In 1996, John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows published the renown paper, "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action", in which they describe several experiments in which they were able to modify the subject's behavior by influencing them in very subtle manners. They explain several different experiments in that paper, but today I want to talk about a specific one and how its findings are being questioned today. "Experiments 2a and 2b: Behavioral Effects of Activating the Elderly Stereotype" was a simple experiment. The experimenter would ask the subjects to construct a sentence with a certain amount of scrambled words and ruling one out as part of a language proficiency exam. Among the scrambled words, there was one that didn't fit into the sentence and this one was a word associated with the elderly. In their experiment they used these words:
| Elderly | Words | Used |
|---|---|---|
| worried | Florida | old |
| lonely | grey | selfishly |
| careful | sentimental | wise |
| stubborn | courteous | bingo |
| withdraw | forgetful | retired |
| wrinkle | rigid | traditional |
| bitter | obedient | conservative |
| knits | dependent | ancient |
| helpless | gullible | cautious |
| alone |
After the subjects completed the task, they would be debriefed and guided to a corridor that they would have to walk through to exit the laboratory. There, they would time with a stopwatch how long would the subject take to walk the length of the corridor, about 10 meters. The hope was to see if priming the subjects with words associated with the elderly would have an effect on the speed at which they walked right after it compared to a group of subjects who had been primed with neutral words (the control group). It is important to note that even though the words above are associated with the elderly, none of them make reference to speed, which they did on purpose to avoid priming on speed per se, they wanted to prime on things associated with the elderly.
The results were astonishing. They noticed that for experiment 2a, the neutral group took an average of 7.30 seconds to walk the corridor, while the primed group took an average 8.28 seconds! For experiment 2b, the results were very similar, 7.23 compared to 8.20. What would this mean?! In general terms it would mean that we, human beings, are a lot less logical and analytical as we may think. Even little things like looking at some words could make our brain associate them with a specific behavior that would take over our bodies in a subconscious manner! It was groundbreaking. The article was published and shared all over the world.
If you want to see the full article, here is a link to a PDF of it: "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action".
The story does not end there, though. Nowadays a greater effort to replicate psychological experiments are being done. That is where Doyen S, Klein O, Pichon C-L, and Cleeremans A come into play with their paper "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?". They thought that the previous paper did not explain everything very clearly and they wanted to try to replicate it. The first thought was that they could not trust a stopwatch for accurate time measuring, so this time around they were going to use sensors on the floor of a 10 meter corridor to time their subjects.
To their surprise, after running the experiment and working with the numbers, they noticed that there was no statistical difference in the speed at which the primed vs non-primed walked. This started to sound even fishier. Observing the experiments 2a and 2b, they noticed another variable which was not explained very well: the person with the stopwatch. Did this person know if the subject in front of him had been primed or if he was part of control group? They decided to test this out. They brought in a confederate to time the subjects while leaving the sensors on the floor without telling him. On top of that, they would say that the subjects had been primed for fast or slow right before he would have to time them. This time around the test was revolving around the timekeeper without him knowing...
Before I say the results, remember that the speed of the subjects was not statistically different in the first run. Well, the results were yet again astonishing! The difference in speed between the non-primed vs the primed was again not statistically significant, but when looking at the time recorder by the person with the stopwatch, it told a different story. Remember that the experiment was carried in the exact same way, the only thing that changed was the person taking the time and his expectations. The data was this:
What does this tells us?! That actually the speed at which the subjects are walking has not changed statistically, nevertheless the person with the stopwatch thinks they did! When he was told that the subject was primed for slow, he would time a larger amount of time, and when he was told that the subject had been primed for fast, he would time a shorter amount of time! So yes, priming is happening, but on who?! On the person expecting results! Which most likely was what happened in the experiment from 1996. There exist something called "confirmation bias" which explains that people would take information just to confirm what we previously believe. But is this happening in such a subconscious manner?
If you would like to read the full article, here it is: "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?".
Why though? We don't know, maybe it's the nerves of the timekeeper looking to time something that would happen faster, maybe his perception was actually a change on speed. With my studies I am looking to get closer to the answer.
I hope you liked it, and I hope it makes you question more reality. If you did, don't forget to upvote, follow, or resteem!
Best,
