The start of each school year was rough. High school students reacted to me with baggage they carried in with them. It was apparent to them I was different (VERY Different) and they tested that in every way possible. But I came equipped with graduate training in behavioral psychology.

Planting Changes

To gain control, I developed systems for everything. I planted changes. After several weeks the kids — like lab rats — were operating within these systems. I put checkmarks next to their name each time they added something, anything, to our class discussion. At first, they worked for the checks. Some of the jocks humored me along, “Did you mark a check for me, Mr. Dames?”

They soon discovered they could direct the discussions in ways that applied to their lives. After a few weeks, no one seemed aware of the checks. No one except for me. In the manner of a true obsessive-compulsive, I micromanaged everything with seven or eight colored pens;  checks in class participation, homework, tests, exams, etc.

My method of teaching was a mix of OCD and operant conditioning; operant conditioning that had been drilled into me in graduate school: “Animals don’t think.” These kids did. I questioned the class about the assigned readings. They responded to the readings in terms of their backgrounds and lives at the time. 

Each time they responded, they were rewarded with a pencil check, and following the laws of operant conditioning, they connected their response and the checkmark to my verbal response. I added up the class-discussion checks–fifty percent of their grade. I created cortico-basal ganglia loops in my “subjects.” I wanted them totally focused on classroom discussions the entire period and behavioral reinforcement achieved that goal. For my survival, I was totally into mind control.

Brainwashing Masses

Had I been familiar with public opinion guru Frank Luntz, I surely would have added his style of brainwashing to my routine. Luntz’s book, “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say It’s What People Hear You Say,” is about brainwashing, essentially scripting the minds of others to think as you want them to. Unfortunately for me -fortunately for my students – his book was published in 2007. I burnt out of the classroom in 1992.

Luntz encouraged the Republican Party to substitute “death tax” for “estate tax.” He found in polling that if you call it an estate tax, about 50% of Americans want to eliminate it. When you think of an estate, you tend to think of someone with considerable wealth. If you call it the death tax, about 70% of Americans want to eliminate it. Americans perceived it wrong to incur a tax upon the family of the deceased. In 2017 though, only individuals with an estate worth more than $5,490,000 would have been taxed. But facts mean little once the script of unfairness gets embedded in our minds. And it took just two “magic” words.

When Luntz polled Americans and asked them whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes for additional law enforcement, 51 percent said they would. When he asked if they would pay higher taxes to halt the rising crime rate, 68 percent said they would. Luntz says the secret is to focus on results, reducing crime, rather than the process of law enforcement.

In the latter half of the 1990s, while Newt Gingrich was Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, he made tapes and videos instructing lawmakers on how to communicate. Many of Gingrich’s ideas were developed together with Luntz. In 1996 Gingrich wrote a memo to the House GOP listing words they should memorize. Words like common sense, family, and freedom would give power to their message. When talking about their opponents the list included sick, welfare, failure, and trader. And from basic neuroscience, Frank Luntz knew the power of a message or script repeated many times. 

The words he shared with Gingrich were tested in focus groups and dial sessions. What sets a dial session apart from a focus group is that everyone holds a small wireless remote control dial with a numerical display from 0 to 100. When they hear something they like, they dial up toward 100, when they dislike something they dial down toward “0.”

On the other side of a one-way mirror, a second-by-second digital line graph plots gut reactions to speeches, commercials, clips from a television show, movie, live presentations of a conversation, etc. Colored line graphs instantly plot for each of the subgroups within the main responding group. Luntz says this is the research equivalent of an EKG measuring a combination of emotional and intellectual responses, getting inside each participant’s psyche, isolating his or her reaction to every word, phrase, and visual.

Implicit, Explicit Memory

Dial sessions pinpoint words and phrases with positive or negative emotive impact. Luntz advises clients to use these words over and over on their target audience, implanting implicit memories. Explicit memory is conscious and cognitive, but an implicit, unconscious memory involves affect, feeling, and emotion over cognition. An irretrievable implicit memory is processed in a very close, but different part of the brain than a conscious, retrievable, explicit memory.

Plant an Action With a Word or Two

You want to know all you can about priming, because planting, implicit, unconscious memories alters our thinking and perception, causing us to respond like automatons. Once the implicit memory is planted, we see and judge a person, situation, or product through the primed frame with no awareness of the prime being planted and no awareness of it after it is stored in our brain. We are bombarded with political and commercial primes to favor parties, people, products, services, and values, and to disfavor others.

Just Because

A word as common as “because” can become a cue, a magic word setting off a social behavior. If you want to skip to the front of a queue, start by saying, “Excuse me,” then make sure the clause that follows begins with “because.” Excuse me, but would you mind if I step in here because I’m nine months pregnant and I’m starting to feel labor pains.”

It doesn’t have to be nearly as dramatic. In 1978 Ellen Langer, Arther Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz carried out a now-classic study where researchers attempted to cut in at the front of a queue to a copy machine. They compared three approaches:

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I am in a rush?”

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

More than ninety percent of the people let the researchers cut in front of them in the first situation when they added: “because I am in a rush.” When in the second situation they offered no excuse at all only sixty percent of the people let them cut in line. So you might expect the same in the third situation because they offered no excuse other than they wanted to make a copy. But this was not so. In the third situation about the same percentage of people let them cut in line as they did in the first situation; more than ninety percent.

The word “because” is the cue or prime that gets others to allow them to cut in line. “Because” sets off an automatic and mindless neurological response of compliance. But it does not work all of the time. If the number of copies is high, the frontal cortex steps in and overrides a mindless response. When they see someone with a stack of papers attempting to cut into line, they do not get sucked in by the prime.

Since people often respond to the structure of the message rather than the actual message, if you set up the right cue, you increase the chance you get the person to mindlessly comply. And by becoming aware of the different forms of cues that set off mindless routines of behavior, you can avoid being primed into mindless compliance.

Warm it Up for Success

Words are only one of many forms of primes. In the classic study by University  of Michigan professor John Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth” (2008), a confederate who is blind to the study’s hypothesis meets volunteers in the lobby of the psychology building. The confederate carries a cup of coffee, a clipboard, and two textbooks. During the elevator ride to the fourth-floor laboratory, the confederate casually asks participants if they will hold the coffee cup for a second while he/she records their name and the time of their participation. After the confederate writes down the information, he/she takes back the coffee. The temperature of the coffee, hot versus cold, is the only factor being manipulated.

 

When participants arrive at the experimental room, they receive a packet containing a personality impression questionnaire describing the target person they are to evaluate. They rate the target person on five bipolar, warm-cold personality traits, and five traits unrelated to warm-cold.

The subjects who held the hot coffee rate the person significantly warmer on the five “warm-cold” traits than those who had held the cold coffee. There is no difference in ratings for the five traits unrelated to warm and cold. This demonstrates the brain’s association between sensations of physical warmth and judgments of interpersonal warmth.

Carry a hand warmer or use biofeedback to warm your hands before shaking hands with someone important to you.

The prime was the physical experience of holding a warm or cold cup of coffee. As with other primes, it operates on an implicit, unconscious level. Holding the warm or cold cup of coffee influenced feelings of interpersonal warmth or coldness without the subject being consciously aware they were being primed.

The processing of physical temperature and interpersonal warmth/trust both take place in a pyramid-shaped part of the brain tucked under parts of the temporal and frontal lobes called the insula. The insula plays a role in both the sensation of skin temperature and the detection of the trustworthiness of others. It is a mind-body coordinator.

 

This study illustrates what is called the social perceiver’s “first pass” in determining whether or not someone can be trusted as a friend or at least a “non-foe,” or is someone who will interfere rather than help with one’s ongoing goal pursuits. The assessment, judgment, or evaluation does not take place in the conscious mind. It is an automatic and obligatory evaluation by the brain, not requiring the perceiver’s intent. 

Bargh relates this to Harry Harlow and John Bowlby. In Harlow’s experiments, monkeys formed an attachment to the warm cloth mother over the wire mothers that fed them. Bowlby demonstrated the need for direct physical contact with the caretaker over and above the caretaker’s satisfaction of the infant’s primary needs of hunger and thirst. 

Because of early life experiences with a warm and caring caregiver, a close mental association develops between the concepts of physical warmth and psychological warmth. Bargh discusses research on the neurobiology of attachment, adding support for the link between tactile temperature and feelings of psychological warmth and trust.

Warmth is considered the most powerful personality trait in social judgment. In an instant, people decide whether or not to do business with you or have anything at all to do with you from that time on, and it can hinge on a warm or cold coffee or handshake.

Planting a Sensation That Drives Behavior

Haptic sensations are another prime. The Oxford English Dictionary defines haptic as “Of pertaining to, or relating to the sense of touch or tactile sensations” and as “having a greater dependence on sense of touch than on sight, especially as a means of psychological orientation.” Haptic is a form of social communication often used by non-human animals, but some people, maybe the ones who formed a close attachment in infancy and childhood, are haptic. 

People like me with a poor childhood attachment may be extremely uncomfortable with haptic communicators. I have to keep myself from physically withdrawing from people who touch in communicating.

“Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgements and Decisions,” published in 2010 in the journal Science, describes the study where Joshua Ackerman and John Bargh had subjects evaluate job resumes of applicants. The only difference between the resumes was the weight of the clipboard holding the resumes. One clipboard was heavier than the other. Subjects holding the heavier clipboard evaluated the job candidate as more serious. 

The brain processes literal and metaphorical versions of touch in the same brain region as warm and cold, the insula. Our neural circuitry does not differentiate between real and symbolic. The heavier weight of the clipboard unconsciously triggers the metaphor of heaviness for seriousness in the subject’s brain and the applicant is rated as more serious.

Rude Words = Rude Behavior

In another Bargh study, participants made sentences as quickly as they could from five scrambled words. Three versions of the scrambled-sentence test were constructed. One was intended to prime the construct “rude,” another to prime the construct “polite,” and a third consisted of neutral words.

When participants complete the task, they are told to take the test paper to the confederate who is standing and talking with someone. The confederate ignores the subject, so the only way she/he can hand in her/his paper is to interrupt the conversation by saying something like “Excuse me,” or “Sorry, but.“ The moment the participant butts in, the confederate who is timing to see how long it takes for the subject to interrupt, stops his/her stopwatch. The maximum period timing can go on is set at ten minutes.

Within this ten minute period, subjects primed with polite words interrupted the confederate about eighteen percent of the time, while subjects primed on rude words interrupted about sixty-five percent of the time. Subjects primed on neutral words interrupted about thirty-eight percent of the time.

Healthy Words Lose Weight

Primes get you to purchase unhealthy foods. So researchers in the Netherlands wanted to see whether overweight and obese people could be primed to purchase healthy snacks. The prime is a flyer handed to them when they enter the supermarket, primed with healthy words within a recipe. 

Overweight and obese participants who received the flyer with health and diet-related words bought almost 75% fewer unhealthy snacks than overweight and obese participants who received the same flyer without the health and diet-related words. The priming effects were independent of whether or not participants thought about the flyer while shopping.

Using Health Primes to Reduce Unhealthy Snack Purchases Among Overweight Consumers in a Grocery Store

Much of our decision-making goes on inside the neural networks of our brains, outside of the conscious mind. Priming affects a wide swath of psychological systems of evaluation, perception, motivation, and behavior. You can be primed to judge a person with kindness or hostility. Companies sell products with primes. Candidates get elected with the help of primes.

Primes can be used as a health-intervention tool to fight obesity. More likely they will continue to be used to get people to buy high-calorie, sugar-laden snacks. Once primed you have no conscious awareness the priming has on your decision-making process. As my father admonished when I borrowed the keys to his car, “Keep your wits about you.”

Good Stereotype, Bad Stereotype

Stereotypes are solid, deep, implicit memories operating at the unconscious level. Like priming, stereotypes can have a negative or positive influence. Claude Steele, then professor and dean of the school of education and social psychology at Stanford University, demonstrated how just the threat of a group stereotype affects performance on an aptitude test. 

In his classic 1995 study published in “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” Black and White students with similar SAT scores were given a test of difficult items from the verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE). One group was told the test diagnosed intellectual ability and the other group was told the test was a problem-solving situation. 

Black students scored lower than Whites when the test was perceived as an ability test, but scored as well as Whites when told it was a problem-solving situation. Black students were threatened by the stereotype of Blacks being less intelligent than Whites.

In 1999, as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Margaret Shih, Associate Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, published a research report, “Stereotype Susceptibility” in “Psychological Science.” Before taking a test, each of the undergraduate Asian, female students in the study filled out a questionnaire. One questionnaire primed them as female, the other as Asian. 

Be Careful of Questionnaires

Questions on the “female-identity-salient conditions” included whether their floors were coed or single-sex, which they preferred and why. On the “Asian-identity-salient condition” each of these Asian undergraduates were asked whether their parents or grandparents spoke any languages other than English, what languages they knew, what languages they spoke at home, and what opportunities they had to speak other languages on campus.

Participants in the Asian-identity group answered an average of 54% of the questions correctly. Participants in the female-identity group answered an average of 43% correctly. Participants in a neutral control group answered an average of 49% correctly. Both positive and negative performances were activated by subtle, implicit priming of their identity. Asians were purportedly smarter, and at the time, females not so smart. The next time you are asked to participate in a survey or to fill out a questionnaire, be on guard as to who is footing the bill and the purpose of the study.

Stigmatized Behavior

A 2009 study published in Experimental Aging Research demonstrated the influence of stereotyping on older people. When older subjects were told that older people perform poorly on a particular memory test, they performed poorly. The study demonstrated that memory suffers when senior citizens believe they are being “stigmatized,” meaning others look down on them because of their age.

The negative effects of age-stereotyping are strongest for adults with the highest levels of education. Adults who value their ability to remember things are the most likely to be sensitive to the negative implications of this stereotyping and most likely to exhibit the problems associated with the stereotype.

Adults who do not feel stigmatized exhibited significantly higher levels of memory performance. If you are confident that aging will not ravage your memory, you are more likely to perform well on memory-related tasks.

I am eighty-two and cannot help feeling stigmatized. Some of it is subtle, some blatant, but there is rampant ageism out there. It is virtually undetectable until you get up in age. I constantly remind myself not to let it get to me.

What I find difficult to let slide is the stigma of mental illness. But I should not be so harsh. People don’t know the reason for the behavior of someone with a mental illness. They cannot see inside their head. Most conclude the person is different. Very different. The Other.

Wired for Prejudice 

Stereotype frames show up in brain scans. The amygdala, activated by fear, anxiety, and aggression is metabolically active when viewing faces of “other” racial groups. In one brain scan study, faces were presented rapidly, much faster than can be consciously perceived. The amygdala especially reacted when white subjects view non-familiar black faces. The amygdala even reacted when white male subjects looked at faded unfamiliar black images in old yearbooks. (See Figure 16-4)

This activation of the amygdala is a non-conscious stereotype response to racial groups and the impact can be literally deadly. Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt had subjects rate how “stereotypically Black” a group convicted of murder appeared. Some of the men had been sentenced to death and some were given less severe sentences, but the subjects did not know about the sentencing. The results showed that the men rated “stereotypically Black” were more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white. They did not get any stricter sentences if their victims were Black, though. 

On a hopeful note, studies by Princeton University social psychologist Susan Fiske show that if you make the subject think about the person as an individual beforehand, the amygdala no longer lights up. In one study, White subjects who viewed the Black faces were asked a simple question like what kind of vegetable might he like to eat. This changed the social frame. When White participants had to place Blacks into a different social category, they reacted to the Black face the same as with a White face.

Are We THAT Irrational?!

Anchoring illustrates just how irrational our implicit thought process gets. Anchoring refers to the presentation of a value or attribute that is used as a reference point to influence a decision. In a German study of judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench, each of them read the case of a woman who had been caught shoplifting. They were then asked to give her a prison sentence (a mock, but serious sentence) for the crime. Before announcing the sentence, each judge rolled a loaded dice that came up with either a three or a nine. 

These numbers served as anchors. The average sentence given by judges who rolled a three was five months and the average sentence for judges who rolled a nine was eight months. The effect of these random numbers serving as anchors amounted to a 50% influence on the time the woman would have spent in prison. 

People anchor their responses to any random number.

 

h compared paroles granted by real-life judges handing down sentences at different times of the day. A prisoner appearing before the judge early in the morning received parole over sixty-five percent of the time. If the convict appeared before the judge later in the day, he received parole only ten percent of the time. If the judge took a break, the parole rate shot back up again when he returned refreshed. Paroles by robots would be more equitable.

Globalizing

A huge form of stereotyping we do across all sectors of the population is globalizing. Globalizing, not in the dictionary sense of international influence or operation, but in Albert Ellis’s sense of letting one part of a person define the person as a whole.

We globalize students, labeling, and stereotyping at the negative side of the spectrum as discipline problems. Certainly, penalties had better be given for infractions of rules. But the student’s bad behavior is different from “the student is bad.” We don’t want to impose our negative globalizations on students, making it that much harder for them to unconditionally accept themselves. 

Throughout most of my elementary school years, I was the class behavior problem. Cooperation, Dependability, Citizenship: F’s in bright red ink down the left side of my report card. Throughout each day, my name was screamed at me as a pejorative. I was a “Discipline Problem” and ironically, perhaps because I was branded as such, I never changed my behavior until I got away from elementary school.

Principals with Department of Defense Overseas Dependent Schools (DoDDS) where I taught for twenty-five years, rotate from district to district, rarely staying at one school for more than a few years. They come into the classroom once a year, usually unannounced for their “observation.” From the back of the room, they sit taking notes. 

It made no difference year to year who the principal was or if they ever came into my classroom at all. I was “Average,” “C,” a reminder of the red Fs down the left side of my report card. My principal told me “C” was an adequate rating and I asked how he might like a “C” rating from his wife for his performance in bed. Education was a major part of my life. I was putting too much into it to be labeled Average.

You’ve Got It, Or Not

Most people make up their minds about a person in seconds and it never changes. Our intuitive system operates automatically. I have been told again and again there is something different about me. As far as job performance evaluation, not a good thing. You don’t want to be different, not in that way. You want to be outgoing, positive, fun to go out with for a beer. 

A study by Harvard psychologists Nalidy Ambady and Robert Rosenthal set out to determine what makes an “effective” high school teacher. They set up a video camera in the classroom and taped the 50-minute class. Eight judges who did not know the teacher, rated him/her on several personality traits after watching the video, without sound. Their ratings correlated highly with the school-year principal ratings.

Then they tried something radical. A teaching assistant randomly selected portions of the 50-minute videos, splicing them together to create 5-second and 2-second video clips. When judges now rated the teachers based on these brief silent clips, the correlation was just a bit lower, but still highly significantly correlated with the principals’ annual ratings. When they compared these short video ratings with ratings students gave to teachers at the end of the semester, the correlation between the student ratings and the judges’ ratings from even a 2-second silent clip was significantly high. People make snap emotional judgments instantly even without hearing someone speak. 

In another study, two interviewers trained for six weeks in employment interviewing techniques conducted one-hundred-fifteen, twenty-minute videotaped interviews. After each interview, they rated applicants. The tapes were edited down to fifteen-seconds showing the job applicant entering the room, shaking hands with the interviewer, and sitting down. 

When an independent group rated the fifteen-second video clips, their ratings correlated strongly with the trained interviewers. Then the tapes were edited down to just the handshake. On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were judged on, observers viewing the tape just up through the initial handshake significantly predicted the outcome of the interview.

We globalize others, limiting focus to one or a small cluster of traits. We globally rate them on their physical appearance, skin color, ethnic background, warm or cold handshake. Kids learn to globalize about themselves by saying things like, “I’m a ‘C’ student.” “I’m a loser.” “I’m lousy at sports.” 

Making ‘C’s in every subject is different from being a ‘C’ student. Behavioral changes affect a change in grades. Take a front-row seat. Volunteer. Take text notes before class and fill in with class notes. Ask questions. Follow rules. If you continue to get ‘C’s, you are never a ‘C’ student. You are a student who continues to get ‘C’s. You can continue to work at changing that.

When I was in my first year of graduate school I was getting all ‘A’s, but one teacher gave me a ‘C’ on a paper I had written that I thought deserved an ‘A’. I went up to the teacher pointing out where I thought it was ‘A’ work. And I explained that I needed all ‘A’’s to get into the psychology program. The professor took the paper and handed it back the next day with the grade change to ‘A’. Never knew you could do that.

Controlling the Script

In athletics, some kids get an early start, but everyone improves with practice. We perform at some level of proficiency and choose or choose not to work hard at improving our performance. A mental change is as important in athletics as it is in academics. It is essential to learn how to control the script and not let it get programmed for you.

If our behavior can be changed without our knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to make willful changes? How are we priming ourselves that may be holding us back? What are conscious and unconscious scripts through which we interact with the world?

We need to be aware of how irrational we are, more irrational than any creature on this planet. We have much of the irrational behaviors of other animals, but we go further. As Albert Ellis pointed out, unlike any of the other animals, we talk to ourselves and tell ourselves sane and insane things. What makes this world inconceivably irrational is we all have our ongoing self-talk, beliefs, attitudes, opinions, and philosophies, impenetrable to others. 

It takes knowledge, skill sets, and patience some of us spend our lives attempting to acquire, to live, work, love, and function with others. This awareness helps to stop blaming and condemning ourselves and others. We can let go of thinking that people and things should be this way or that. We plod along, to a large degree incomprehensibly irrational and that is the way we are. As you make changes in yourself, you will see this even more clearly in others. It might be nice if you could make changes in them. But you have enough to work on.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body