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Salute, carders, here is a useful article about manipulating your consciousness.
Imagine that before an important university exam, you are sitting in the hallway waiting for the door to the classroom to open.
And then a person sits down with you and starts a conversation with you on some abstract topic. For example, how great it is to be a university teacher, do research, and help students become professionals.
Or, for example, about how fun it is to be a football fan, blow a pipe and throw bottles from the stands, and after the match drink beer and start fights with fans of other teams.
He discusses this with you for literally three minutes, then leaves... and after another quarter of an hour or half an hour, the exam begins.
Do you think this three-minute conversation could have affected your exam results? Practice shows that even as I could.
In a psychological experiment, where a group of students was randomly divided into two parts, and one half was asked to think about the work of a professor at a university, and the other – about the life of a football fan, the results were different in the end.
Students from the first group answered an average of 56% of the exam questions, while students from the second group answered only 43% of the questions.
This is the difference between passing and failing an exam.
This is how priming works – one of the most interesting ways to manipulate your mind.
What is priming and how it works
At the beginning of the 20th century, the goalkeeper of the Czech national team, Frantisek Planichka, was famous for his ability to confidently beat off penalties even from the best scorers.
When an eleven-yard field goal was awarded to him, as if out of frustration, he tore off his cap, threw it at the goal and took up his position.
Nine times out of ten, the opposing player hit the exact corner of the goal where the cap flew.
From a psychological point of view, this is a classic example of priming.
At the end of the 20th century, psychologists discovered a rather interesting thing.
If two events follow one another, your impressions of the first event greatly influence your attitude to the second, even if they are not logically related to each other.
One of the most famous experiments in the field of priming was the following: people were asked to write on a piece of paper the last two digits of their passport number, or spin a roulette wheel and write down the number that appears.
After that, they were shown a certain product (a toy, an electric appliance, etc.) and asked to name the most likely price at which this product is sold in the supermarket.
It turned out that the numbers recorded by the participant in the first part of the experiment often appeared in the second part.
If the number 14 appeared on the roulette wheel, then five minutes later the person said that a teddy bear should cost $ 14 in the store – and the person who got the number 8 assumed that the same bear should cost $ 8 and not a cent more.
There is no logic in this – just previous experience influenced the subsequent one.
Returning to the example of a conversation before the exam, students from the first group were encouraged to think about an intelligent person who solves complex problems, is successful in the academic field, and these thoughts set up the participants of the experiment for intellectual work.
And students from the first group were set up to think about actions that were anti-intellectual and obnoxious – and they went to the exam in this mood.
Priming conscious and unconscious.
Priming can be either conscious or unconscious.
Or, in other words, conscious or unconscious.
It is possible to control people's behavior in a choice situation by pre-training them with rational arguments.
This, for example, is often done by lawyers, gradually leading the judge or jury to the right opinion.
Many examples on this topic can be found in the court speeches of the famous Russian lawyer Plevako.
For example, when a saleswoman was being tried for failing to close her store after the prescribed time on the eve of a religious holiday (as required by law), Plevako arrived at the courtroom a little late, and in response to the judge's remark, he said: "Your Honor, you have twenty minutes past ten on your watch?
Mine only have five minutes.
What about you, Mr. Prosecutor?
A quarter past ten?
And the secretary?"
After the judge made sure that everyone's watches showed different times, Plevako closed the case with just one sentence:"If we – responsible, educated, important people – can't set our watches exactly, then do we really condemn a simple shopkeeper for the same thing?"
Sometimes priming is unconscious, when a person does not realize that he was influenced either before or after.
Hardly one of the hundreds of football players who had hit the goal of Planichka would have believed that the thrown cap of the goalkeeper controlled his behavior.
Unconscious priming can be carried out by selecting words or images that evoke associations in the victim's brain that the manipulator needs.
Priming controls the selection
Imagine that there are two projects, one of which guarantees an 80% probability of success, and the other has a 20% risk of failure.
Which of these projects would you rather invest in or get a job in?
If you are not a mathematician, then you will almost certainly choose the first option.
Although in reality, projects are equivalent – in both cases, there is an 80% probability of success and a 20% probability of failure.
However, due to the fact that in the first case the word "success" was used, and in the second – the words "risk" and "failure", the first option is associated more with something good, and the second-with something bad.
Priming drives intelligence
I already told you about an experiment today where a student's ability to solve problems was enhanced or weakened by just a harmless conversation about the life of a professor or about the life of a football fan.
And here's an even crueler experiment:
The university singled out students who came out of some problem group.
Negroes, people with criminal records, former proscribed addicts, etc.
We divided them into two groups.
One of them just took written exams, and before the exam, the teacher asked students from the second group: "You're from Harlem (you were in prison, you used to take illegal drugs), right?" – and only after that he gave out task sheets.
The second group coped much worse with the exam tasks, and it did not matter at all what subject the exam was in.
The reminder of a dysfunctional past instantly switched the student's brain to thinking about their problems, shortcomings, and weaknesses, and this undermined their self-confidence and, as a result, their ability to solve problems.
Priming manages aggression
In another well-known experiment, people were first asked to play a game where they had to pull out cards with different words from the deck and put them on the playing field, and then, in the second part of the experiment, the same people were asked to express their opinion about one of the politicians.
However, half of the participants in the experiment were given cards with emotional, aggressive words ("killer", "war"), and the second half – cards with neutral words ("weather","move").
As a result, the statements of those people who were shown cards with emotional words turned out to be much more aggressive, harsh and evaluative than the statements of those people who got neutral cards in the game.
Although the game had nothing to do with the politician who was offered to be evaluated, or even with politics in general.
Priming helps you feel better
Even more interesting is an experiment in which people were asked to complete sentences with individual words removed for 15 minutes.
However, even here people were divided into two groups, one of which was allowed to complete phrases that included words related to old age ("old man", "cane", "decrepit", "elderly") – and the other half were offered similar phrases with neutral words.
So, the first group was asked to complete the phrase " An old man crosses the street on pedestrian ______", while the second group received the phrase "A man crosses the street on pedestrian______".
When people were let out of the classroom after 15 minutes, the first group walked down the corridor to the front door much more slowly than the second group-although they were moving at the same speed before the experiment began.
Priming manages interest
Another study on priming showed that if a person watches two videos in a row – a TV program on economics and a presidential candidate's speech – the audience pays more attention to economic aspects in the politician's speech.
However, if you replace the program on economics with a criminal chronicle, attention will shift to the part of the politician's speech where he talks about the rule of law.
If a film about terrorism is used as a substitute, then when watching a politician's speech, the viewer's attention will be drawn to arguments about national security.
And so on.
In the same way, you can make people notice certain details in a large picture by first talking to them about blue butterflies or red apples – accordingly, the first person will notice more blue elements in the picture, and the second – red ones.
How to protect yourself from priming
First of all, it is important to understand that priming itself can not force you to do something unnatural.
You can't use priming to make you eat a nail or change your sexual orientation.
Rather, priming allows you in situations where you can choose between A and B, and both options are natural and acceptable for you – buy a girl flowers or chocolate, interrupt a conversation with colleagues or wait for it to end, walk down the corridor quickly or slowly, go on vacation to Paris or London-to tip the scales in the right direction for the manipulator.
If you want to sell more French wine, play a French chanson in the supermarket, if you want to sell more Italian wine, play Celentano songs.
So you should not be afraid of priming beyond measure.
But if you have reason to believe that somewhere you are being affected by it, and you would like to protect yourself from this manipulation, then remember that the main key here is awareness and thoughtfulness.
So if you have a suspicion that you are being manipulated by priming, do a simple thing.
Postpone making a decision for a while.
And then think about everything that concerns your choice from the very beginning, focusing only on this problem and not being distracted by others.
The recipe is simple – but it really works.
Imagine that before an important university exam, you are sitting in the hallway waiting for the door to the classroom to open.
And then a person sits down with you and starts a conversation with you on some abstract topic. For example, how great it is to be a university teacher, do research, and help students become professionals.
Or, for example, about how fun it is to be a football fan, blow a pipe and throw bottles from the stands, and after the match drink beer and start fights with fans of other teams.
He discusses this with you for literally three minutes, then leaves... and after another quarter of an hour or half an hour, the exam begins.
Do you think this three-minute conversation could have affected your exam results? Practice shows that even as I could.
In a psychological experiment, where a group of students was randomly divided into two parts, and one half was asked to think about the work of a professor at a university, and the other – about the life of a football fan, the results were different in the end.
Students from the first group answered an average of 56% of the exam questions, while students from the second group answered only 43% of the questions.
This is the difference between passing and failing an exam.
This is how priming works – one of the most interesting ways to manipulate your mind.
What is priming and how it works
At the beginning of the 20th century, the goalkeeper of the Czech national team, Frantisek Planichka, was famous for his ability to confidently beat off penalties even from the best scorers.
When an eleven-yard field goal was awarded to him, as if out of frustration, he tore off his cap, threw it at the goal and took up his position.
Nine times out of ten, the opposing player hit the exact corner of the goal where the cap flew.
From a psychological point of view, this is a classic example of priming.
At the end of the 20th century, psychologists discovered a rather interesting thing.
If two events follow one another, your impressions of the first event greatly influence your attitude to the second, even if they are not logically related to each other.
One of the most famous experiments in the field of priming was the following: people were asked to write on a piece of paper the last two digits of their passport number, or spin a roulette wheel and write down the number that appears.
After that, they were shown a certain product (a toy, an electric appliance, etc.) and asked to name the most likely price at which this product is sold in the supermarket.
It turned out that the numbers recorded by the participant in the first part of the experiment often appeared in the second part.
If the number 14 appeared on the roulette wheel, then five minutes later the person said that a teddy bear should cost $ 14 in the store – and the person who got the number 8 assumed that the same bear should cost $ 8 and not a cent more.
There is no logic in this – just previous experience influenced the subsequent one.
Returning to the example of a conversation before the exam, students from the first group were encouraged to think about an intelligent person who solves complex problems, is successful in the academic field, and these thoughts set up the participants of the experiment for intellectual work.
And students from the first group were set up to think about actions that were anti-intellectual and obnoxious – and they went to the exam in this mood.
Priming conscious and unconscious.
Priming can be either conscious or unconscious.
Or, in other words, conscious or unconscious.
It is possible to control people's behavior in a choice situation by pre-training them with rational arguments.
This, for example, is often done by lawyers, gradually leading the judge or jury to the right opinion.
Many examples on this topic can be found in the court speeches of the famous Russian lawyer Plevako.
For example, when a saleswoman was being tried for failing to close her store after the prescribed time on the eve of a religious holiday (as required by law), Plevako arrived at the courtroom a little late, and in response to the judge's remark, he said: "Your Honor, you have twenty minutes past ten on your watch?
Mine only have five minutes.
What about you, Mr. Prosecutor?
A quarter past ten?
And the secretary?"
After the judge made sure that everyone's watches showed different times, Plevako closed the case with just one sentence:"If we – responsible, educated, important people – can't set our watches exactly, then do we really condemn a simple shopkeeper for the same thing?"
Sometimes priming is unconscious, when a person does not realize that he was influenced either before or after.
Hardly one of the hundreds of football players who had hit the goal of Planichka would have believed that the thrown cap of the goalkeeper controlled his behavior.
Unconscious priming can be carried out by selecting words or images that evoke associations in the victim's brain that the manipulator needs.
Priming controls the selection
Imagine that there are two projects, one of which guarantees an 80% probability of success, and the other has a 20% risk of failure.
Which of these projects would you rather invest in or get a job in?
If you are not a mathematician, then you will almost certainly choose the first option.
Although in reality, projects are equivalent – in both cases, there is an 80% probability of success and a 20% probability of failure.
However, due to the fact that in the first case the word "success" was used, and in the second – the words "risk" and "failure", the first option is associated more with something good, and the second-with something bad.
Priming drives intelligence
I already told you about an experiment today where a student's ability to solve problems was enhanced or weakened by just a harmless conversation about the life of a professor or about the life of a football fan.
And here's an even crueler experiment:
The university singled out students who came out of some problem group.
Negroes, people with criminal records, former proscribed addicts, etc.
We divided them into two groups.
One of them just took written exams, and before the exam, the teacher asked students from the second group: "You're from Harlem (you were in prison, you used to take illegal drugs), right?" – and only after that he gave out task sheets.
The second group coped much worse with the exam tasks, and it did not matter at all what subject the exam was in.
The reminder of a dysfunctional past instantly switched the student's brain to thinking about their problems, shortcomings, and weaknesses, and this undermined their self-confidence and, as a result, their ability to solve problems.
Priming manages aggression
In another well-known experiment, people were first asked to play a game where they had to pull out cards with different words from the deck and put them on the playing field, and then, in the second part of the experiment, the same people were asked to express their opinion about one of the politicians.
However, half of the participants in the experiment were given cards with emotional, aggressive words ("killer", "war"), and the second half – cards with neutral words ("weather","move").
As a result, the statements of those people who were shown cards with emotional words turned out to be much more aggressive, harsh and evaluative than the statements of those people who got neutral cards in the game.
Although the game had nothing to do with the politician who was offered to be evaluated, or even with politics in general.
Priming helps you feel better
Even more interesting is an experiment in which people were asked to complete sentences with individual words removed for 15 minutes.
However, even here people were divided into two groups, one of which was allowed to complete phrases that included words related to old age ("old man", "cane", "decrepit", "elderly") – and the other half were offered similar phrases with neutral words.
So, the first group was asked to complete the phrase " An old man crosses the street on pedestrian ______", while the second group received the phrase "A man crosses the street on pedestrian______".
When people were let out of the classroom after 15 minutes, the first group walked down the corridor to the front door much more slowly than the second group-although they were moving at the same speed before the experiment began.
Priming manages interest
Another study on priming showed that if a person watches two videos in a row – a TV program on economics and a presidential candidate's speech – the audience pays more attention to economic aspects in the politician's speech.
However, if you replace the program on economics with a criminal chronicle, attention will shift to the part of the politician's speech where he talks about the rule of law.
If a film about terrorism is used as a substitute, then when watching a politician's speech, the viewer's attention will be drawn to arguments about national security.
And so on.
In the same way, you can make people notice certain details in a large picture by first talking to them about blue butterflies or red apples – accordingly, the first person will notice more blue elements in the picture, and the second – red ones.
How to protect yourself from priming
First of all, it is important to understand that priming itself can not force you to do something unnatural.
You can't use priming to make you eat a nail or change your sexual orientation.
Rather, priming allows you in situations where you can choose between A and B, and both options are natural and acceptable for you – buy a girl flowers or chocolate, interrupt a conversation with colleagues or wait for it to end, walk down the corridor quickly or slowly, go on vacation to Paris or London-to tip the scales in the right direction for the manipulator.
If you want to sell more French wine, play a French chanson in the supermarket, if you want to sell more Italian wine, play Celentano songs.
So you should not be afraid of priming beyond measure.
But if you have reason to believe that somewhere you are being affected by it, and you would like to protect yourself from this manipulation, then remember that the main key here is awareness and thoughtfulness.
So if you have a suspicion that you are being manipulated by priming, do a simple thing.
Postpone making a decision for a while.
And then think about everything that concerns your choice from the very beginning, focusing only on this problem and not being distracted by others.
The recipe is simple – but it really works.
