Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!

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1:16Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, Charles W. Chuck Bryant, the best all-around boy. And there's Jerry Rowland, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I really wish I hadn't have told you that. I think I've told you that before, though, so you forgot the first time, so maybe you'll forget again. I can't. You know how people keep lists of, like, episodes we say we should do or movies we've mentioned or something like that? They should keep a list of the different things that we've talked about and then completely forgot we talked about, because I'm sure it would be extensive.

1:49Yeah, big list. So speaking of big lists, Chuck, we're talking today about priming, which is the present tense of primus. And what it refers to is a psychological term where you are prompted to respond in a certain way, behave in a certain way, choose a certain selection based on some prompt that was given to you without your knowledge. It could either be so flashed so fast or something on a computer screen that your conscious awareness didn't pick up on it. Or it could just be presented to you in a way that you're not aware that it's actually related to the thing that you're being, say, tested on.

2:36Yeah, exactly. And this is a big, big thing in cognitive psychology. And, you know, we're going to kind of get into the ins and outs of it. Some of it, there's a lot of, for some of it, there's a lot of studies that sort of indicate that there's a lot to it. There's another part of this that we'll get to where there's a lot of studies that aren't so great or that have been fudged or data has been massaged or completely fabricated. Where it seems like sometimes they've been found out as far as researchers go. But it all comes down to memory. And if you're talking to a cognitive psychologist, they'll say that you have a couple of ways that you remember things.

3:19One is your explicit memory or your active or conscious memory. Like if you're trying to think of something and you actively engage your memory to think of a thing, that's what that is. Like if somebody asked, like, what was Chuck's senior superlative in high school? I would think back to a fact that I learned, and I would say best all-around boy. Is it going to be one of those? and then implicit memory is the other one and that's just what you remember on an unconscious level so if someone asked me what was your senior superlative wouldn't even have to think about it best all around boy boom it just pops right out as if it were my name right so those are and this is really kind of like breaking it down to a really rough basic level it's much more complex than that.

4:07But we bring that up because it's tapping into the different ways that you access memories that priming is based on. And you said it falls under the rubric of cognitive psychology. And that is true. Cognitive psychology has shown very clearly that this actually works, that if you give somebody, say, a word and you show them a list of associated words, it's going to just happen that they're able to pick out the associated word faster than other words. Well, we'll give you some examples rather than just me mushing it all together. Let's tease it out a little bit like 80s perm. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah.

4:54Let's do that. So because I think if we give some of these examples, it'll make a little more sense. For instance, this first exercise that Dave helped us out with this, Dave found this one, is called the lexical decision. And that is the idea that if you put a word up on a screen for a couple of seconds as a priming word, then you as the subject will indicate the next word on the screen, if it's real word or if it's a nonsense word, but that will be influenced. That's your lexical decision you're making. That will be influenced by that priming word that you saw. So in this case, Dave, do you see example, doctor, you're sitting there in the lab, Bill Murray's on the other side, Got the shocker already.

5:36Doctor pops up on the screen for a couple of seconds. That's your priming word. And then all of a sudden, other words pop up after that. And our job as a subject is to say whether that's a real word or a nonsense word. And obviously, you would think, if the word nurse pops up, you're going to be recognizing that a lot faster. So it's all about sort of the speed at which you recognize this as a real or nonsense word. nurse would be a much faster decision than if it was basketball. Right. And it's basically words that share a similar category are more easily accessed once you've been primed. Almost like the way that we sort things is by putting them into large categories like doctor, nurse, hospital, stethoscope, right?

6:23And then once you open that that category by thinking of doctor, you're going to be able to access the other stuff in that category much more easily than say something in a totally different category, like cheese in the same category as delicious, that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Or basketball. That seems like what it's tapping into. And it actually seems to reveal that that's kind of how we store memories. There's another demonstration that was pretty famous that shows for sure, Again, I just want to get this across. Cognitive priming really works. If you give people a list of words and one of those words has a letter missing, say a vowel that could make multiple different words, they're going to choose or they're going to fill it in differently based on the other words in the list.

7:12So, for example, if you have a list of words, bread, milk, hot, and then the last word is S-O blank P. Poop. Sure. Or soup. I think would be a good one, right? And depending on whether you know how to spell, you might spell it with an O or a U. Doesn't matter. You're still getting the point across. Right. Or in another example of the same, you know, missing letter, if it was shower, water, wash, S-O blank P, you might say poop there too, actually. Soap would probably be the word. So, you know, it's just a very intuitive kind of thing happening because your brain is working in a very unconscious way because, or I guess non-conscious, because it is primed by the words that precede the one with the missing letter.

8:02Right. And then there's also another, there's a number of different ways of priming people cognitively, but one that just makes total sense and I think we've all run into is repetition priming. Yeah. To where if you are shown like, say, a pair of words, maybe sometimes one of which is a nonsense word and you have to pick out the nonsense words. If you see like in a list over and over again, doctor and nurse, doctor and nurse, it comes up three times out of a seven word pair list. You're going to move through those much more quickly because it's right there in the forefront of your mind. So it hasn't faded yet.

8:40So you're just going to pick it out faster and faster the more it's repeated. That's a form of priming, too. Yeah, and these are all really super basic, you know, examples of cognitive priming. But it does show a lot about how our memory works, that we're not just computers where we can just access a file by clicking on it very easily. We develop shortcuts in our brain. We take shortcuts when we see words relating them to other words. And so it just makes sense. You know, you could access something much, much faster because you have been primed. In other words, our implicit memory can be tapped into a lot quicker than our explicit memory.

9:24And at the end of each of these experiments, it kind of quickly became tradition where the researcher would stand up and point at the person and be like, you've been primed. Maybe adding a booyah once in a while. Yeah, and Deion Sanders just moonwalks through the background. Right. So we know that this is true also, not just because study after study has shown that this is actually correct. But when you put somebody in the wonder machine, the fMRI. Got to do it. Yeah. They found that, like, if you ask somebody the name of, let's say, Anya Taylor-Joy. Say, who was the star of the witch? But also the gorge, which isn't that good.

10:07I thought that was fairly entertaining for a not great movie, by the way. The Gorge? Yeah, it was highly watchable on like a rainy, not feeling so great day kind of movie way. Agreed. Yeah. Agreed. It just, wow, it takes a sudden turn. It's just really surprising. But yes, I agree. I think that's a good way to put it. You would stop and think like, oh, Anya Taylor-Joy. And by the way, The Queen's Gambit is one of the best things I've ever seen in my entire life. Oh, yeah, yeah. The chess one? Yeah. That was great. Okay, but if you also said, you know, name an animal that you think of when we say the word dog, what they found in the fMRI is that different parts of your brain light up.

10:50So we do know that priming does have a certain effect, and it is different than our normal kind of conscious recall. I wonder if when they go into the FMRI wonder machine room now, the person running it just goes, I'm telling you what's going to happen. A part will light up and then another part will light up and you'll all be super happy. Right. You've been primed. You've been primed and Dion just very slowly moonwalks. So, okay, that's cognitive priming. Now, imagine if you were a psychologist and you said cognitive priming is kind of boring. What if we could use that same stuff to get people to eat more cheeseburgers?

11:32Yeah. Or to vote for a particular candidate in a political election? Like, what if priming works for that? Yeah. And that's, you know, it's all fun and games to just sort of look at these little experiments on a campus somewhere. But if it has a real world use, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising and stuff like that, you can bet corporations are going to sink some money into doing that. Yes. So this is the handoff right here between cognitive psychology to social psychology. And social psychology has studied priming in great detail. It was a huge hit. You'll remember back to nudge economics.

12:12We talked about it in our live episode. Like it was a big deal in like the late aughts to about the 2012, I think something like that was just a big deal. And it makes a lot of sense. Like the it's the basis of things like ideas like McDonald's uses red and yellow in its logo because those colors are associated with excitement or energy or happiness. or they call it a happy meal because over time, your kid will associate McDonald's with being happy or I'm loving it. It's just a jingle or whatever. And it makes sense. It's very catchy. But there's some part of your mind that has been primed to later on associate McDonald's with love, a positive feeling.

13:01All of this is examples of social psychology research supporting this idea that you can prime human beings to behave in a certain way just by using the same techniques that cognitive psychologists prove work, dog, cat, soup, soap, that kind of stuff. Yeah. As long as you beat them over the head with it over and over and over again, because repetition is one of the real keys here. Yeah. Your brain just being repeatedly exposed to that stimuli is going to, you know, strengthen that association over time. And brands know that. And that's why it drives you crazy during, you know, especially like sports playoffs or something when you see those same ads over and over and over again.

13:40Yeah. It's a it's big business. They're putting a lot of money into into, you know, sort of manipulating your brain, essentially. Yeah. I've said it before and I'll say it again. And for some reason, some ad exec chose morning reruns of Murder, She Wrote, Start TV, Over the Air Channel Network for the Burger King terrible singing ad. There had to be some research into their viewership or something, right? It had to be. But the thing is, every single other ad is for like Humana life insurance or health insurance or dental insurance because you're you're you just retired and now you have Medicaid.

14:22Like every other ad that almost stood out. You know what I mean? Well, you know, our senior friends in the world are very concerned about their health and their health care and they still love those cheeseburgers. That's two things we know. I guess that's it. But it was it really grated on my nerves because I watched that almost every day. All right. Why don't we take a break here? That's a good table setting, I think. And we'll get back to how this is used in media and politics. Should be no surprise. Right after this.

15:22New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week, we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.

15:55Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI, and now it will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

16:31This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company. with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Babes, what are you doing? What? I'm just mowing the lawn. No, it's blazing hot and dry out here. Don't you remember? Smokey Bear says. Avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on SmokeyBear.com with many other wildfire prevention tips.

17:10Right. Thanks, honey bear. Because remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.

17:40All right. So we're back. As promised, we're going to talk a little bit about the media and politics, hopefully in a way that's just sort of quick and easy and doesn't ripple too many feathers, because what we've seen is that is media of all stripes do this and politicians of all stripes to this. So it's not singling anybody out. But when the media gets involved in this kind of thing to shape public opinion, they do so with sort of a three pronged fork, which is agenda setting, framing and priming agenda setting being like, hey, what's what are we going to focus on editorially? Maybe in today's paper or every day until the election, how are you going to frame this thing to suit what we feel is probably our slant?

18:25And then priming. It's basically, you know, similar to the first two, but this is the subconscious things where we're going to repeat things. We're going to use certain words, certain images as to just sort of reinforce how we framed it. Yeah. So just for a quick example, let's say the news decides to focus on crime and that the framing they use is that crime is on the rise. and you hear about this over and over again, night after night on the news, or you read about it over and over again on your favorite news site, eventually you're going to be primed to think that crime is on the rise and you might even be a little scared of it.

19:05Or relating to politics, a politician might latch onto that and be like, crime's really hot right now. We're going to make crime like the main point. We're going to use it to set the agenda of our campaign. And we're going to tap into that fear that this person, this lack of safety that the people out there watching the news feel because they're being told over and over again, crime is on the rise. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. Yeah, there's no data. They feel that it is. Exactly. They feel that crime is on the rise. So we, a politician, are going to tap into that and use it to hopefully get an election because now we can prime them to get that emotional response out of them over and over again until we finally move them to the voting stations to vote for me, the politician.

19:52That's right. I would vote for you, by the way. I would never, ever run for public office. Oh, of course you wouldn't. But I would never. I would vote for you for like, you know, Neighborhood Watch or something. Would you vote for me for best all-around boy? Oh, man. I mean, you got that one in the bag, buddy. You don't need my vote. Thank you. Dog whistling is something that, you know, you've heard more and more as a sort of a term used in, you know, social media, politics, on the news, stuff like that. And that is when you use a word or a phrase that you sort of are in, not sort of, you are very much intentionally associating with a negative racial stereotype, but it's not explicit.

20:36So it operates on the unconscious level. And this is where they tap into implicit bias, something that everybody has. And, you know, using these coded words, basically, there are things that I will never take one of these. It scares me to death. So I would never sit down for an implicit bias test because I don't want to know what my implicit biases are. It's absolutely terrifying because we all have them. I guess that's probably cowardly and I should know what my implicit biases are so I can try and correct those. But it's basically when they sit you down and you say, all right, respond very quickly, as quick as you can to a series of images or words.

21:17and anything within 200 and 600 milliseconds is your implicit memory. Anything after that you're thinking about and that's explicit memory. Right. Two things about that. One, if implicit bias is a universal thing and everybody has it, you're free. You don't have to feel as bad about it. I mean, it's definitely something you should work to correct if you can, but you don't have to feel like it's just you. That's one thing. And then the second thing, too, Chuck, is if it is true that we all are implicitly biased, say, like along racial lines, I feel like you could explain it by saying by it's an example of our evolutionary history not being caught up yet to our current social history.

22:08Like when we form modern societies, we jump light years ahead as far as evolution goes. And the way that we think and see the world just completely just hit warp speed. But evolutionarily, there's still a big lag catching up to it. So we're fearful of people who don't look like us or have a slightly different culture or live in a different nation. Yeah. Just evolutionarily speaking, even though we know we shouldn't feel that way, that that's not actually how things are, that conflict between those two things is what the real issue is. Yeah. Oh, boy. That really lets us all off the hook, I guess.

22:49Right. So we don't have to do anything about it. It'll work itself out in 10 ,000 years. Well, here's the thing, though, is when they when people sit down for these tests, they found that even people who explicitly disagree with any kind of racial stereotyping, like I would never do that. I don't have those at all. They even while I was about to say fail those tests, they even chart on those tests as showing implicit bias. Right. So we've made it pretty squarely into social psychology territory right now. And there were some early experiments trying to figure out how you can persuade people using priming.

23:25It's like the 70s, right? Yeah, late 70s, early 80s. And so one of the first ones came out of 1979. And it was a social psychology experiment where you gave people a scrambled word list and said, make a sentence out of this. Right. And so you would get something neutral like her found new I. And I knew her is a sentence you could make out of that. Or you would give something like leg break arm his. You could say break his arm. And so one group was given more hostile word scrambles to make sentences out of. The other was more neutral. And then that was part one. After that, they were asked to consider a hypothetical scenario in which somebody is kind of ambiguously responding or interacting with somebody.

24:21I think I saw that Donald is refusing to pay rent until his landlord paints his apartment. And the people who were given the hostile word scrambles rated Donald as much more hostile than the people who were given the neutral word scrambles. So what they're showing is that you can nudge people toward forming an impression about someone they know basically nothing about based on priming them to feel one way or another about them. And that was like, if we can do that, man, what else can we do? That really opened the floodgates. Yeah. And, you know, we're about to take through a series of little things like that that might be mind blowing for you where you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe that works.

25:03But just, you know, sort of put that in your pocket for now. There was one study where it was, again, it was unscrambling sentences. Half the people were given sentences that had words that were, you know, like healthier, healthy and active lifestyle words. The other half got neutral words. And afterward, they said, all right, you guys are great. You can go ahead and leave there. You can, you know, go up the stairs there and get out of here to the parking deck up there. or you can take the elevator. And people who unscrambled the healthy words were more likely to take the stairs afterward. So, you know, they're like, hey, that's pretty much proof right there.

25:41They had been primed with these healthy words to make a healthier decision afterward. Right. And we'll, like you said, we'll talk about some of the more shocking or surprising studies. But before that, we need to mention a guy named John Barg, who became basically the rock star of this field. Starting in the 90s, he essentially wrote a paper that said like all of this is possible like here's how you do that here's how you take the findings of cognitive priming and turn it into social or behavioral priming and he was very famous for a couple of studies many studies but there's two that really stuck out to me that let me give you an example one is that he tested whether something is as random as temperature could affect your impression of another person.

26:32Yeah, I thought that was interesting because it was like they'd use words and finally like, hey, I wonder if words worked, if images alone could work. And then he was like, hold my beer. What about just temperature alone? So in this one, he asked participants to hold a something warm, like a cup of coffee or warm cup of soup or something or a frosty cold beverage. And then they bring them in a room where they have a conversation with a stranger. And they found that or he found he claimed to find that people who were primed with that warm beverage had a warmer impression of that stranger afterward.

27:08And people who had that cold beverage frostier had a you know, they felt frostier toward that person. Right. So that means that you can nudge people to feel a certain way based on metaphor, priming using metaphor and not even words or images. but temperature. Another one that he figured out was, and this is the one he's really famous for, I think this is the one that came from his 1996 paper, but he tested to see how certain kinds of words affect certain kinds of behavior. And he took some 19, 20, 21-year-old students and had them do that famous word scramble. Priming researchers love word scrambles.

27:51And some had just a normal neutral set of words to pick out from. Another had sets of words that were associated with being old, but not so straight ahead that you'd be like, these are all old people words, but they were like bingo or Florida or wrinkles, that kind of stuff, right? That was part one. And then the students who were participating thought that they were done at that point. But he said, okay, now we've got to do part two, but we're going to have to go to the end of the hall and turn right. And there's another lab we need to go to for the second part of this test. But the real thing he was doing was clocking how long it took the students to make it from one end of the hall to the other.