Primes are Guiding your Life in ways you can’t Predict

What if smelling a flower makes you spend a few months’ worth of income on a vacation? That could just be happening right now. Welcome to the world of priming.

That flower is a “Prime”. We are creatures that are almost always primed with something. That means we have already received a nudge from some object, word, sound, face, emotion, etc., that influences our future behavior, emotions, thoughts, and information processing. The answer to “Why did I do this?” can sometimes be as simple as “Something must’ve primed me”.

Priming happens in many forms. It can affect your immediate decisions. It can nudge you to select 1 particular option out of many others. It can influence the words you use daily. It can affect what you remember.

Ask someone to say Silk 10 times rapidly and then answer a question immediately: Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk Silk. What does a cow drink? They’ll probably say Milk. Silk structurally primed Milk, and a Cow conceptually also primed Milk. The brain unconsciously uses priming while thinking until we override it with deliberate analysis.

Core concept: The Priming Effect is a mechanism where exposure to a stimulus through the senses activates certain concepts in the mind. It makes the activated concepts more likely to influence any aspect of thinking and behavior in the immediate future. In a way, priming increases sensitivity to certain other things that we pull out of the mind or pay attention to.

Additional nuance: Primes make it easier to process new information that is related to the prime. E.g., When exposed to the word “butter” it is easier to think of “bread” right after it. This increase in processing is not permanent; it reduces over time.

Let’s look at 2 cases where we are intimately familiar with priming: Learning & Advertisements.

Priming in learning

A classic demonstration of priming is that primes improve recall. Just one exposure^[1] to a word (the prime) can increase its use in the future. Similarly, being exposed to an idea can make another related idea more recognizable. A study^[2] showed that words can make recognizing related words easier. Specific pictures can also make related words easier to spot. While learning, this has a profound implication – when we learn and get exposed to technical words, new words, diagrams, pictures of objects, etc., it makes related things easier to recognize. As learning gets more complex, new related things enter the brain. So the primes (components of past learning) are already pushing more complex ideas into an accessible zone.

One specific form of priming called “repetition priming” is used to strengthen learning^[3] in very subtle yet powerful ways. In repetition priming, a person learns something and there are performance gains over time even if the learning is repeated only once without connection to the first learning. This has led to a commonly observed educational practice where students learn something in the classroom, move on to other things, and one exposure to it during a homework assignment enhances their learning. Increasing the repetition via practice tests, quick summaries, or more complex problems further enhances learning (I discuss this in depth here.)

Priming still has limitations. In one study^[4], researchers asked the question – will exposing students to related questions help them answer new (but related) questions in a test? If yes, which of the 2 methods helps – asking related questions (passive priming) OR asking related questions after they have gone through effortful work on the related questions (active indirect review)? In their study, students did not benefit from priming but did benefit from indirect review during a test.

The difference was – priming was passive (they were asked questions related to prior questions but not exactly similar questions), and indirect review was active (they were asked questions related to prior questions but not exactly similar questions but they had to search their memory and access related information in reviewing a 6000-word text). So, just being asked related questions did not prime them to perform better on the test (passive). But, being asked to process and recall related information via related questions helped them recall during a test (active). In short, priming isn’t a substitute for effortful processing while learning.

Priming in advertisements

A lot of buying decisions are influenced by primes – they are unconscious, and an advertisement has likely planted a thought to influence a decision. Research has shown that consumers recall specific brands when they are primed by their branded sounds – like the iPhone notification sound, the Windows booting sound, etc. Emotional sounds/music tend to increase^[5] brand recall. Food advertisements^[6] tend to induce the motivation to eat. Ideas like sustainability^[7]influence a hotel’s brand image positively. This list will go on – marketing implicitly tries to prime consumers to make certain decisions. (although priming isn’t the only way, check out the framing effect).

A pretty cool investigation^[8] shows how priming changes our consumer behavior when it comes to luxury brands. Researchers observed that priming consumers with luxurious words to buy a luxury product doesn’t always work. If consumers are distracted and aren’t able to think about the product, they tend to favor the luxury product. If consumers are not distracted, the focus on luxury words (primes) tends to draw attention toward the practical aspects of a product and not favor the over-priced products – an effect opposite to the intention of the luxury brand. However, if the luxury words induce powerful emotions, they tend to rely on those emotions and recommend the brand’s products to others. A way to see this is – if consumers rely on emotions, luxury words (primes) nudge them toward the luxurious product and also make it shareable. If consumers are asked to think – they are nudged away from the product because of the prime, which makes them focus on the practical value of the product.

Insight: If luxury has to be sold, using luxury-related primes with words, music, colors, etc., is most likely to help when the consumer has a lasting emotional reaction to the product or are they are distracted enough to not think deeply about the product.

Similarly, exposure to food logos^[9] influences the next snack. But being mindful of your choices (by thinking more clearly) counters this effect. This is a general trend – deliberate thinking often counters a prime.

Core types of priming we see

1. Semantic priming: Getting exposed to specific words influences recall, perception of related concepts, and decisions that align with the prime. E.g., medical vocabulary in the context of vitamins can prime shopping for healthy foods.
2. Repetition priming: A few times of exposure or practice give us performance gains in a skill. E.g., Learning a musical passage and then revising it a day later starts improving the performance of that passage over time, more than 2 repetitions would.
3. Affective priming: Primes evoke emotions that influence future behavior. E.g., Watching cat videos on Instagram increases the motivation to do a subsequent boring chore because the positive emotions from the videos influence how the chore is evaluated.

How priming happens

One of the mysterious (or fun) aspects of priming is that we are almost never aware of the prime. Only sometimes we can think back and trace our experiences to see if we were primed. For example, you might wonder why you want to re-decorate your room. And you might then recall your experiences and realize that a friend of yours mentioned they went to IKEA.

While attention is an explicit conscious awareness of information, priming remains largely implicit^[10] and subconscious. There are a massive amount of things that guide your behavior via priming. Advertisements prime you, emotions prime you, conversations prime you, etc. Almost anything can prime you to do something.

One theory of priming is that the brain readily organizes everything you learn in an associative network like a cobweb – a rich web of associations between concepts & information. And, to recall some information (like a fact), it travels this network through (through a process called spreading activation). So, in this network, if you activate the concept of Mercedez, you are in a network region that closely relates to cars, and then you are primed to think with a focus on cars. This network is multi-dimensional. Each part of the network connects to related things on multiple levels: time of learning, meaning of the concept, examples, structural similarity, similarity in spelling and sound, etc. So activating any of these levels enables priming. So Mercedes primes cars, and Silk primes Milk.

Another facet of the priming mechanism is that this network of information has “weights” assigned to each little bit of information. A prime changes these weights and usually increases them. When the weight increases, that bit of information becomes more accessible and more influential – i.e., it becomes more salient.

And because it is salient, it percolates into everyday life to influence decisions, perception, and memory. The strongest test that this happens^[11] is that priming increases a person’s response time to a thing related to the prime.

When a prime has happened:

1. Memory for some things will be better
2. Your decisions will be aligned with it
3. Your feelings will be modified by it
4. Processing related information will get easier

Not all primes are made the same. Some primes are more powerful. One reason is that our attention naturally captures faces, people, erotic imagery, odd items, repetitive patterns, emotions, etc. But there is a lot more going on.

Multiple mechanisms enable priming^[12]. In some cases, priming takes a conceptual form and increases the weight of related concepts. Suppose you walk through a street and walk past a bakery with a fresh baking smell enveloping the street. Later that day, someone asks you to think of a word starting with B. There is a higher chance that you’ll say “Bread” instead of “Bicycle”. The prime (bakery smell) influences your response at a conceptual level by triggering the concept of bread because it is a related concept to the prime.

In other cases, priming occurs when a person is asked to focus on the prime. Suppose you go fruit shopping and spend a good amount of time selecting apples. Later that day, someone asks you to memorize a list of random items that include the word apple. You are likely to remember apple more easily because you were primed by the mental effort put into shopping for apples.

Why it’s so hard to figure out what has primed us already

There’s more beauty to how priming works. One study used word priming techniques like going from lion to tiger to stripes. In everyday situations, this is like smelling flowers, leading to thinking of a garden, and that leads to planning a vacation. Imagine that… you are planning a vacation and spending 3 months’ salary on a weekend because you smell a flower.

This form of priming is called “mediated priming” and resembles everyday experiences because we are constantly getting primed by many things and it is possible to have a chain reaction of these primes.

In their study^[13], they found evidence of 2 independent processes are taking place. In one process, a prime triggers associations (like hearing about a lion brings a tiger into mind). Just like thinking of making music instantly brings different instruments to mind. Another process somehow jumps out of the association of concepts, like a 2-D creature entering the 3rd dimension, and integrates other unrelated information in the thought processes. This may be one of the reasons why it’s so hard to realize what primes us in everyday situations, because logical reasoning usually retraces the path by finding associations. The extra-dimensional jump is hard to predict and become aware of.

Imagine you are in a city. You can trace the route from point A to point B. But priming effects appear like tracing a route and teleporting to another point C. That makes the effect of priming a little unpredictable.

It’s easy to go from smelling a flower to planning a vacation. But it is extremely difficult to retrace the path from “Why are we going on a vacation?” to “Oh, I smelled a flower while returning from work!”.

If you want to know how this teleportation happens, I recommend reading about “construal levels“.

Fun fact

You can get primed in your sleep.

A study^[14] showed that exposing foreign words during NREM sleep improved the recall of those words and reactivated associated memories. This isn’t exactly priming – it is cueing. The main difference is that cues are more purposeful and are directly related to something a person has already learned. In this case, German participants with no training in Dutch had already learned new Dutch words, and they were cued via audio during their sleep. Cueing during non-REM (lighter stages of sleep) improved recall of these words by strengthening their memory and associations. Participants who were cued with German-Dutch word pairs performed 10% better than those who were exposed to uncued words. On a test of 120 word pairs, the group of participants with the German-Dutch cuing got an average of 105 words right, and those without the pairing (but still exposed to words) had an average score of 95.

How priming is used in ads & design

1. Imagery of healthy people showcasing their fitness can promote the sale of health-related products.
2. Metal music can promote the perceived effect of an energy drink.
3. Talking about how others are using an app can prime sharing content from the app.
4. A call to action on the home screen could be ignored, but repetition priming may make it more effective when it reappears a few times on other pages of a site/app.
5. The nature of content – “how-to” articles – can prime the user to look at adverts on tools that do the job.
6. Talking about sustainability and the environment can lead to purchasing eco-friendly products.
7. Danger zone signs prime attention for dangerous spots on a road.

Takeaway

• Everything around you is likely to have an influence on your future thoughts, emotions, and behavior. These primes have an influence that cannot be easily predicted.
• Priming can be purposefully used to guide behavior in learning, advertisements, and everyday life.
• The answer to why you did what you did may just be “an unknown prime” made me.

Sources