Priming Denialism

The concept of priming in psychology refers to the unconscious effect that a stimulus can have on future behavior. For example, one study looked at the effect that holding a hot or cold beverage before an interview would have on that person's opinion of the interviewer¹. The stimulus in this situation is the hot or cold beverage and what they found was that the temperature translated almost directly into our metaphorical way of assessing the behavior of the people we meet; that is, after holding a cold drink people were more likely to interpret their behavior as cold and unwelcoming, whereas holding a hot drink people were more likely to interpret their behavior as warm and welcoming. As the researchers describe it, this is like "holding warm feelings towards someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder".

Recently, a classic experiment in priming by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows² was called into question by Doyen, Klein, and Pichon in their paper: "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?"³. The original study looked at the effect that including "old" words in a language task has on the speed at which subjects leave the lab following the experiment, so the expectation was that if a list of words a subject was asked to memorise included words like "old", "grey", or "bingo" (among others) then the participants would walk slower as they leave the room. Doyen, however, suspected that subtle behaviors of the experimenters may have affected the behavior of the subjects and so they attempted to replicate the study with a stricter methodology to rule out a number of possible confounds.

To do this, Doyen gave a set script to all 10 'experimenters' which they were to repeat to the subjects taking part in the study. The interesting twist in this study was that Doyen told half of the 'experimenters' that they should expect their subjects to walk slowly, and the other half that they should expect their subjects to walk more quickly. The 'experimenters' were given stopwatches to time the speed of the participants (as was done in the Bargh experiment), but there were also infra-red sensors that gave a more objective and more accurate measure of the walking speed.