Priming the Pumpers (the weight lifters)
When I was around twenty years old I lifted weights at the downtown Newark, N.J. YMCA. Occasionally my friend and I would ask one of the big body builders whether he was ill or had been ill. We were downstairs in the rather small weight room every weekday night and knew the routines of all of the weightlifters. We knew how much they pressed, bench pressed, squatted, curled, and how long they worked out each evening. So we had a fair idea of how we affected our target and had a laugh afterwards if our “suggestions” took effect.
Priming Research Studies
That was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Studies on priming were not well known until John Bargh, social psychologist at Yale, published his studies in the mid 1990s. A prime is a cue or event that affects a person’s future behavior without them being aware they were primed.
In one of Bargh’s studies, two groups of New York University undergraduate students took a scrambled-sentence task as part of what they were told was a language proficiency experiment. They participated in the experiment one at a time.
Participants were given five-word scrambled sentences and instructed to use the words in a grammatically correct sentence. In the primed group, the words were elderly-stereotyped like Florida, old, lonely, forgetful, retired, wrinkled, cautious, and alone. The control group were given words unrelated to the elderly stereotype.
After completing the task, both groups were instructed to hand in their paper to a person down at the end of a hall. Unknown to the students, they were timed walking down the 9.75 meters. The elderly primed group took significantly longer to walk down the hall.
Primed from the Get-Go
We wonder why groups and individuals behave in ways we cannot comprehend. Primes are planted and internalized in each of us early on. During priming, neural networks preactivate and much like robots we are programmed to behave in the future in certain ways.
We are primed from the get-go to think of ourselves and behave in line with primes. Some of us have been primed “winner;” others “shithead.” We are constantly primed with an “ideal” body type few of us can aspire to. Most of us continue priming ourselves with these same primes for most if not all our lives.
Are We THAT Irrational?!
Anchoring, a type of priming, illustrates just how irrational we can be. 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. Anchoring refers to the presentation of a value or attribute used as a reference point to influence a decision.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.
Roll again please, your honor!
Living in an Irrational 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 (renowned psychologist and author of more than fifty books) 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.
We rarely can change another person, but we need to become aware of how we prime ourselves and how we stereotype ourselves in the process . What are the conscious and unconscious scripts through which we interact with the world?
Early on, I was certain I was dead-end beyond repair. I could not have been convinced I would someday move forward with virtually no limit, each day an adventure of learning and growth.
No one is beyond repair!
Hopefully, you believe this. Belief is at least thirty percent of any therapy, including talk and pharmaceutical. So believe me and add thirty percent to the effectiveness of all the therapies in my blog and book. They work for me and will work for you.
It is so very hard to start anything new, so pick one you can make your own and begin.
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
