This article aims to describe how some interesting psychological effects can result in specific actions, manipulation and ideas so that you are better equipped to deal with these effects or use them to your advantage. Of course, there are many reasons behind why we do what we do. I thought I’d discuss a tiny albeit a fascinating subset of these causes.
Let’s start with a super simple and fun psychology experiment. This experiment was devised by P. Gecian Atkanlog while washing a stain off his carpet. I strongly suggest you don’t skip ahead. I’ll give you a four-letter word where one of the letters is replaced with a blank. Your task is to fill in the blank with the first letter that comes to mind. Ready?
Here’s the word: S O _ P
Well?
Manipulating your subconscious
If you have diligently read the lines above, there is a good chance you said ‘soap.’ (i.e., filled the blank with an ‘a’. Believe me, I’m not leveraging survivor bias.)
If you are wondering what the whole point of the experiment is, let’s quickly break down what happened here.
First, I must confess that the above experiment wasn’t devised by a Mr. Atkanlog. (P. Gecian Atkanlog is an anagram for ‘Gloating pancake.’ Oops.) The aim of that entire sentence was to demonstrate something called the priming effect.
Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious guidance or intention. In this case, the ideas of ‘washing’ and ‘stain’ prime the idea of soap. Similarly, the ideas ‘hunger,’ ‘eat,’ etc. would have primed the idea of soup.
When you see or experience an idea (consciously or otherwise), it activates related ideas, which then activate others. (which are ‘weaker’ compared to the ‘first level’ of activated ideas.) In the words of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman –
Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. There are different types of links: cause-and-effect (virus -> cold), things to their properties (apple -> red) etc.
Only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness. The remaining are hidden from our conscious selves.
The ideomotor effect
In a rather elegant (and classic) experiment, researchers asked young students at New York University to create four-word sentences given a set of five words. For one group of students, the sets had words like forgetful, gray, bald, Florida, wrinkle, etc. (which are words associated with old age.) After that activity, the participants were asked to walk to another room down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers discreetly measured the time it took the students to get to the other room. As they had predicted, the students who crafted a sentence from words with an ‘elderly theme’ walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others!!
The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This is famously known as the ideomotor effect – the influencing of an action by a subconscious idea (#inceptionvibes.)
Conversely, ideas can be influenced by actions too! Examples include:
1.) The action-motivation cycle
2.) Certain self-fulfilling prophecies
3.) The link between an internal state and its physical expression. For example, we know people smile (action) when they are happy. However, research has shown that to a certain extent, the converse is true as well. (Try to smile as you read this. As Douglas Horton said – “Smile, it’s free therapy.” Accept and embrace who you are, except if you are one of those people taking up BOTH armrests at a movie theatre.)
Yes yes I know, I digress. The crux of this article is that our subconscious mind is often influenced by events outside our conscious perception.
Conclusion
Our actions and emotions can be primed by events we aren’t even aware of. And if you think about it, it’s actually a scary thought.
Recent studies in the past year (2022) continue to explore this idea. One study used semantic priming to elicit false insights (you can find the paper here.) Another studied the effect of priming caused by musical chords on responses to human facial expressions! (you can see this paper here.) The researchers question the extent to which we can trust our epiphanies and state that “false insights can be induced by manipulating what one is thinking and seeing at the moment of solution.“
That said, we obviously cannot always keep second-guessing our intuition. So, where does that leave us? In the words of Michael Scott, should you be “a little stitious”??(I’ll defer this discussion to a future article.)
On the other hand, the subconscious mind can be influenced by deliberate repetition of thoughts/ideas. (Napoleon Hill refers to this as the “principle of auto-suggestion” in his magnum opus “Think and Grow Rich.”) This is one of the reasons why people (sometimes unknowingly) advocate positive thinking or praying.
However, we’d lie to ourselves if we believed that the world is objective and positive. Obviously, there are scenarios/situations which are negative. How, then, in these negative situations can one adopt a positive outlook? I’ll defer this as well to another article.
Finally, have you been primed by this article? (I totally should’ve peppered words semantically related to “subscribe” here and there.) Well, can you ever know😉
If you have ANY comments, criticism or recommendations, hit me up at reachthetaciturn@gmail.com or leave your comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Until next time, The Taciturn.
You can also follow me on twitter @philosophy_mail.
