Related to: Priming and Contamination

Psychologists define "priming" as the ability of a stimulus to activate the brain in such a way as to affect responses to later stimuli. If that doesn't sound sufficiently ominous, feel free to re-word it as "any random thing that happens to you can hijack your judgment and personality for the next few minutes."

For example, let's say you walk into a room and notice a briefcase in the corner. Your brain is now the proud owner of the activated concept "briefcase". It is "primed" to think about briefcases, and by extension about offices, business, competition, and ambition. For the next few minutes, you will shift ever so slightly towards perceiving all social interactions as competitive, and towards behaving competitively yourself. These slight shifts will be large enough to be measured by, for example, how much money you offer during the Ultimatum Game. If that sounds too much like some sort of weird New Age sympathetic magic to believe, all I can say is Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross, 2004.¹

We've been discussing the costs and benefits of Santa Claus recently. Well, here's one benefit: show Dutch children an image of St. Nicholas' hat, and they'll be more likely to share candy with others. Why? The researchers hypothesize that the hat activates the concept of St. Nicholas, and St. Nicholas activates an idealized concept of sharing and giving. The child is now primed to view sharing positively. Of course, the same effect can be used for evil. In the same study, kids shown the Toys 'R' Us logo refused to share their precious candy with anyone.

But this effect is limited to a few psych laboratories, right? It hasn't done anything like, you know, determine the outcome of a bunch of major elections?

I am aware of two good studies on the effect of priming in politics. In the first, subjects were subliminally² primed with either alphanumeric combinations that recalled the 9/11 WTC attacks (ie "911" or "WTC"), or random alphanumeric combinations. Then they were asked to rate the Bush administration's policies. Those who saw the random strings rated Bush at an unenthusiastic 42% (2.1/5). Those who were primed to be thinking about the War on Terror gave him an astounding 75% (3.75/5). This dramatic a change, even though none of them could consciously recall seeing terrorism-related stimuli.

In the second study, scientists analyzed data ...