You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming. Every perception, no matter if you consciously notice, sets off a chain of related ideas in your neural network. Pencils make you think of pens. Blackboards make you think of classrooms. It happens to you all the time, and though you are unaware, it changes the way you behave.

  One of many studies that have revealed how much influence your subconscious mind has over the rest of your thinking and behavior and how easily it can be influenced by priming was conducted in 2003 by Aaron Kay, Christian Wheeler, John Barghand, and Lee Ross. People were separated into two groups and asked to draw lines between photos and text descriptions. One group looked at neutral photos. They drew lines to connect kites, whales, turkeys, and other objects to descriptions on the other side of the paper. The second group connected lines to descriptions for photos of briefcases, fountain pens, and other items associated with the world of business. Participants were then moved into isolated rooms and told they had been paired off with another subject. The other person was actually in on the experiment. Each person was then told they were now going to play a game in which they could earn up to $10. The researchers presented the subject with a cup and explained two strips of paper waited inside, one with the word “offer” written on it and another with the word “decision.” The subject was then given a choice—blindly pluck a slip of paper from the cup, or allow the other person to blindly select. The catch? Whoever pulled out the “offer” slip would get the $10 and choose how it was divided between both parties. The partner would then choose to accept or reject the offer. If the partner rejected, both received nothing. This is called the ultimatum game, and its predictability has made it a favorite tool of psychologists and economists. Offers below 20 percent of the total amount are usually turned down.

  Most people chose to do the picking. They didn’t know both slips had “offer” written on them. If they instead let the other person do the picking, the actor pretended to get the “decision” slip. So everyone in the study was put in the position of making a reasonable offer, knowing if they did not, they would miss out on some free cash. The results were bizarre, but confirmed the scientists’ suspicions about priming.

  So how did the two groups differ? In the group who connected neutral photos to their descriptions before the ultimatum game, 91 percent chose to split the money evenly—$5 each. In the group who connected the business photos, only 33 percent offered to split the money evenly; the rest tried to keep a little more for themselves.

  The researchers ran the experiment again with real objects instead of photos. They had participants play the ultimatum game in a room with a briefcase and leather portfolio on the far end of a table along with a fountain pen in front of the participant’s chair. Another group sat in a room with neutral items—a backpack, a cardboard box, and a wooden pencil. This time, 100 percent of the neutral group chose to split the money evenly, but only 50 percent of those in the group sitting in a room with business-related items did the same. Half of the business-primed group tried to stiff the other party.

  All of the subjects were debriefed afterward as to why they behaved as they did, but not one person mentioned the objects in the room. Instead, they confabulated and told the researchers about their own feelings on what is and is not fair. Some described their impressions of the people they were playing the game with and said those feelings influenced them.

  Mere exposure to briefcases and fancy pens had altered the behavior of normal, rational people. They became more competitive, greedier, and had no idea why. Faced with having to explain themselves, they rationalized their behavior with erroneous tales they believed were true.

  The same researchers conducted the experiment in other ways. They had subjects complete words with some of the letters omitted, and again those who first saw business-related images would turn a word like “c—p—tive” into “competitive” 70 percent of the time while only 42 percent of the neutral group did. If shown an ambiguous conversation between two men trying to come to an agreement, those who first saw photos of business-related objects saw it as a negotiation, whereas the neutral group saw an attempt at compromise. In every case, the subjects’ minds were altered by unconscious priming.

  Just about every physical object you encounter triggers a blitz of associations throughout your mind. You aren’t a computer connected to two cameras. Reality isn’t a vacuum where you objectively survey your surroundings. You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull. Some objects have personal meaning, like the blow-pop ring your best friend gave you in middle school or the handcrafted mittens your sister made you. Other items have cultural or universal meanings, like the moon or a knife or a handful of posies. They affect you whether or not you are aware of their power, sometimes so far in the depths of your brain you never notice.

  Another version of this experiment used only smell. In 2005, Hank Aarts at Utrecht University had subjects fill out a questionnaire. They were then rewarded with a cookie. One group sat in a room filled with the faint smell of cleaning products while another group smelled nothing. The group primed by the aroma in the clean-smelling room cleaned up after themselves three times more often.

  In a study by Ron Friedman where people were merely shown but not allowed to drink sports beverages or bottled water, those who just looked at sports drinks persisted longer in tasks of physical endurance.

  Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn’t notice.

  You can’t self-prime, not directly. Priming has to be unconscious; more specifically, it has to happen within what psychologists refer to as the adaptive unconscious—a place largely inaccessible. When you are driving a car, the adaptive unconscious is performing millions of calculations, predicting every moment and accommodating, adjusting your mood and manipulating organs. It does the hard work, freeing up your conscious mind to focus on executive decisions. You are always of two minds at any one moment—the higher-level rational self and the lower-level emotional self.

  Science author Jonah Lehrer wrote extensively about this division in his book How We Decide. Lehrer sees the two minds as equals who communicate and argue about what to do. Simple problems involving unfamiliar variables are best handled by the rational brain. They must be simple because you can juggle only four to nine bits of information in your conscious, rational mind at one time. For instance, look at this sequence of letters and then recite them out loud without looking: RKFBIIRSCBSUSSR. Unless you’ve caught on, this is a really difficult task. Now chunk these letters into manageable portions like this: RK FBI IRS CBS USSR. Look away now and try to recite them. It should be much easier. You just took fifteen bits and reduced them to five. You chunk all the time to better analyze your world. You reduce the complex rush of inputs into shorthand versions of reality. This is why the invention of written language was such an important step in your history—it allowed you to take notes and preserve data outside the limited capacity of the rational mind. Without tools like pencils, computers, and slide rulers, the rational brain is severely hampered.

  The emotional brain, Lehrer argues, is older and thus more evolved than the rational brain. It is better suited for complex decisions and automati
c processing of very complex operations like somersaults and break dancing, singing on key and shuffling cards. Those operations seem simple, but they have too many steps and variables for your rational mind to handle. You hand those tasks over to the adaptive unconscious. Animals with small cerebral cortices, or none at all, are mostly on autopilot because their older emotional brains are usually, or totally, in charge. The emotional brain, the unconscious mind, is old, powerful, and no less a part of who you are than the rational brain is, but its function can’t be directly observed or communicated to consciousness. Instead, the output is mostly intuition and feeling. It is always there in the background co-processing your mental life. Lehrer’s central argument is “you know more than you know.” You make the mistake of believing only your rational mind is in control, but your rational mind is usually oblivious to the influence of your unconscious. In this book I add another proposition: You are unaware of how unaware you are.

  In a hidden place—your unconscious mind—your experience is always being crunched so suggestions can be handed up to your conscious mind. Thanks to this, if a situation is familiar you can fall back on intuition. However, if the situation is novel, you will have to boot up your conscious mind. The spell of highway hypnosis on a long trip is always broken when you take an exit into unfamiliar territory. The same is true in any other part of your life. You are always drifting back and forth between the influence of emotion and reason, automaticity and executive orders.

  Your true self is a much larger and more complex construct than you are aware of at any given moment. If your behavior is the result of priming, the result of suggestions as to how to behave handed up from the adaptive unconscious, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions and musings because you aren’t aware of the advice you’ve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.

  When you hug someone you love and then feel the rush of warm emotions, you have made an executive decision which then influenced the older parts of your brain to deliver nice chemicals. Top-down influence makes intuitive sense and isn’t disturbing to ponder.

  Bottom-up influence is odd. When you sit next to a briefcase and act more greedy than you usually would, it is as if your executive brain centers are nodding in agreement to hidden advisers whispering in your ear. It seems mysterious and creepy because it’s so clandestine. Those who seek to influence you are sensitive to this, and try to avoid creating in you the uncomfortable realization that you have been duped. Priming works only if you aren’t aware of it, and those who depend on priming to put food on the table work very hard to keep their influence hidden.

  Let’s look at casinos, which are temples to priming. At every turn there are dings and musical notes, the clatter of coins rattling in metal buckets, symbols of wealth and opulence. Better still, casinos are sensitive to the power of the situation. Once you are inside, there are no indications of the time of day, no advertisements for anything not available inside the box of mutually beneficial primes, no reason to leave, whether to sleep, eat, or anything else—no external priming allowed.

  Coca-Cola stumbled onto the power Santa Claus has to prime you during the holidays. Thoughts of childhood happiness and wholesome family values appear in your subconscious as you choose between Coke or a generic brand of soda. Grocery stores noticed an increase in sales when the smell of freshly baked bread primed people to buy more food. Adding the words “all natural” or including pictures of pastoral farms and crops primes you with thoughts of nature, dissuading thoughts of factories and chemical preservatives. Cable channels and large corporations prime potential audiences by adopting an image, a brand, so as to meet you halfway before you decide how to engage and judge them. Production companies spend millions of dollars to create trailers and movie posters to form first impressions so you are primed to enjoy their films in a certain way right up until the opening titles. Restaurants decorate their interiors to communicate everything from fine dining to psychedelic hippie communes in order to prime you to enjoy their cheese sticks. From every corner of the modern world advertisers are launching attacks on your unconscious in an attempt to prime your behavior to be more favorable for the bottom lines of their clients.

  Businesses discovered priming before psychologists did, but once psychology started digging into the mind, more and more examples of automaticity were uncovered, and even today it isn’t clear how much of your behavior is under your conscious control.

  The question of who is truly in the driver’s seat was made far more complex in 1996 by a series of studies published by John Bargh in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  He had New York University students unscramble thirty separate five-word sentences. He told them he was interested in their language abilities, but he was really studying priming. He assembled three groups. One unscrambled sentences with terms associated with aggression and rudeness such as “brazen,” “disturb,” and “bluntly.” Another group unscrambled words from a bank of polite terms like “courteous” and “behaved.” A third group served as a control with words like “gleefully,” “prepares,” and “exercising.”

  The experimenters told the students how to complete the task and once they were done to come find them to receive the second assignment, but this was the real experiment. When each student approached the researcher he or she found him already engaged in a conversation with an actor who was pretending to be having trouble understanding the word puzzles. The researcher completely ignored the student until he or she interrupted the conversation or ten minutes passed.

  The results? The polite-word group waited on average 9.3 minutes to interrupt; the neutral group waited about 8.7 minutes; and the rude-word group waited around 5.4 minutes. To the researchers’ surprise, more than 80 percent of the polite-word group waited the full 10 minutes. Only 35 percent of the rude-word group chose not to intrude. The subjects were interviewed after the experiment and couldn’t pinpoint why they chose to wait or to interrupt. The question never entered their minds because as far as they knew, their behavior had not been influenced. The scrambled sentences, they believed, had not affected them.

  In a second experiment, Bargh had participants unscramble sentences that contained words associated with old age, like “retired,” “wrinkled,” and “bingo.” He then clocked participants’ speed as they walked down a hall to an elevator and compared it to the speed they walked when they first strolled in. They took about one to two extra seconds to reach their destination. Just as with the rude-word groups, the old-word groups were primed by the ideas and associations the words created. To be sure this was really a result of priming, Bargh repeated the experiment and got the same results. He ran it a third time with a control group who unscrambled words related to sadness to be sure he hadn’t simply depressed people into walking slower. Once again, the old-age group tottered along the longest.

  Bargh also conducted a study in which Caucasian participants sat down at a computer to fill out boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or Caucasian men flashed on the screen for thirteen milliseconds, faster than the participants could consciously process. Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning. Those exposed to the images of African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw Caucasian faces. Even though they didn’t believe themselves to be racist or to harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual.

  Studies of priming suggest when you engage in deep introspection over the causes of your own behavior you miss many, perhaps most, of the influences accumulating on your persona like barnacles along the sides of a ship. Priming doesn’t work if you see it coming, but your attention can’t be focused in all directions at once. Much of what you think, feel, do, and believe is, and will continue to be, nud
ged one way or the other by unconscious primes from words, colors, objects, personalities, and other miscellany infused with meaning either from your personal life or the culture you identify with. Sometimes these primes are unintended; sometimes there is an agent on the other end who plotted against your judgment. Of course, you can choose to become an agent yourself. You can prime potential employers with what you wear to a job interview. You can prime the emotions of your guests with how you set the mood when hosting a party. Once you know priming is a fact of life, you start to understand the power and resilience of rituals and rites of passage, norms and ideologies. Systems designed to prime persist because they work. Starting tomorrow, maybe with just a smile and a thank-you, you can affect the way others feel—hopefully for the best.

  Just remember, you are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances. If you bring a grocery list, you’ll be less likely to arrive at the checkout with a cart full of stuff you had no intention of buying when you left the house. If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve. Just like the briefcase on the table, or the clean aroma in the room, you can fill your personal spaces with paraphernalia infused with meaning, or find meaning in the larger idea of owning little. No matter, when you least expect it, those meanings may nudge you.

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  Confabulation