In the late 90s, a large chunk of the field of social psychology started dedicating itself to figuring out ways to subtly persuade and influence people’s everyday decisions without their awareness. If you’re into freedom of choice, this was a close call.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is this season of Revisionist History about?
This season of Revisionist History, we're investigating everything from the secret behind the perfect nooks and crannies in Thomas' English muffins to the merits of Paw Patrol against its critics.
There's some things that really piss me off when it comes to Paw Patrol.
It's pretty simple. It sucks.
My son watches Paw Patrol. I hate it. Everyone hates it. Except for me.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reached the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.
I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin. Legendary singer-songwriter and philanthropist, Jewel.
Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun.
And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Financing. I figured out the formula is have to work hard, then that's magic. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic. Listen to Math & Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 2: Who are the guests on Math & Magic podcast?
There's another demonstration that was pretty famous that shows for sure, again, I just want to get this across, cognitive priming really works. If you give people a list of words and one of those words has a letter missing, say a vowel that could make multiple different words, they're going to choose or they're going to fill it in differently based on the other words in the list.
So, for example, if you have a list of words, bread, milk, hot, and then the last word is S-O blank P, poop. Sure. Or soup. Oh, sure. I think would be a good one, right? Yeah. And depending on whether you know how to spell, you might spell it with an O or a U. Doesn't matter. You're still getting the point across.
Right. Or in another example of the same missing letter, if it was shower, water. Wash, S-O blank P. You might say poop there too, actually. Soap would probably be the word.
So, you know, it's just a very intuitive kind of thing happening because your brain is working in a very unconscious way because, or I guess non-conscious, because it is primed by the words that precede the one with the missing letter.
Right, and then there's also another, there's a number of different ways of priming people cognitively, but one that just makes total sense, and I think we've all run into is repetition priming. Yeah. To where if you are shown like, say, a pair of words, maybe sometimes one of which is a nonsense word and you have to pick out the nonsense words.
If you see like in a list over and over again, doctor and nurse, doctor and nurse, it comes up three times out of a seven word pair list. You're going to move through those much more quickly because it's right there in the forefront of your mind. So it hasn't faded yet. So you're just going to pick it out faster and faster the more it's repeated. That's a form of priming too.
Yeah, and these are all really super basic examples of cognitive priming. But it does show a lot about how our memory works, that we're not just computers where we can just access a file by clicking on it very easily. We develop shortcuts in our brain. We take shortcuts when we see words relating them to other words. And so it just makes sense.
You know, you could access something much, much faster because you have been primed. In other words, our implicit memory can be tapped into a lot quicker than our explicit memory.
Right. And at the end of each of these experiments, it kind of quickly became tradition where the researcher would stand up and point at the person and be like, you've been primed. Maybe adding a booyah once in a while.
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Chapter 3: What is cognitive priming?
Like, who was tired that day? Who had a bum ankle or who – You know, there's just so many different variables to account for on why someone would take the stairs or an elevator or why somebody would walk slower down the hall. Maybe they were super bored by this experiment. And so they walked a little more sluggish or something like that.
And those types of variables, they weren't accounting for ever, it seems like.
I think we can just go ahead and reveal now.
Yeah, sure.
So I wish you had been a luminary in the field of social psychology and priming research back in the late 90s, early 2000s, because you could have derailed this whole thing before it ever got started.
Because if that seemed ridiculous to you, that idea that you could suggest old-related or age-related words to 20-year-olds and they're going to walk slower because they were just thinking about being elderly. Yeah. If that seems ridiculous to you, you are 100% right.
It's a ridiculous study and it's ridiculous that the entire field of social psychology, economics, the politics paid attention to this and went all in on it. But what we have, what we're actually talking about today is one of the biggest black eyes in the history of psychology that didn't involve torturing human beings.
Yeah, but, you know, let's tick through a few of these that you found kind of quickly because I think it just illustrates, though, how a company or a political party would really latch on to this when they see stuff like this without kind of like critically thinking on how they got there. One study, exposure to fishy smells would induce suspicion on trust-based economic exchanges in a trust game.
In other words, like they smelled something fishy, so they're going to carry that over as in something smells fishy. Yeah.
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