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Priming Theory

Vraciu Ioan

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

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Priming theory states that if you are exposed to visual, auditory, kinesthetic,

conceptual, or semantic, influences a response in the same modality. This theory is used to

support other theories and phenomena, but it’s also used for influencing human behavior in

various conjectures.

There are three stages for this process: in the first stage the primed stimulus makes the

information that relates with it accessible; in the second stage, an impression forms that this

information comes from our reaction to another stimuli, unrelated to these ones; in the third

stage, the information the became accessible is used for the judgements, decisions and

immediate behaviors (Loersch & Payne, 2016).

Priming offers an explanation for the behavior that is predominantly contextual. It seems that

people don’t base their decisions on all the information that they have from a certain topic,

they base their decisions on the information that is more accessible (Wyer & Swell, 1989,

apud Bless & Burger, 2016). The information becomes accessible through priming,

influencing us in two ways (Molden, 2014, apud Bless & Burger, 2016): assimilation – those

who are exposed to hostile stimuli they will interpret a situation to be more hostile (Swell &

Wyer, 1979, apud Bless & Burger, 2016); or contrast – in a study, participants who were

exposed to images of movie stars known for their attractiveness, they rated their partners to be

less attractive (Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980, apud Bless & Burger, 2016).

At a social level priming has an adaptive role. According to the information we hold about the

present circumstances and the people involved, we anticipate their reactions to the given

situation (Smith & Mackie, 2016). Therefore, priming almost always stays at the base of our

social behavior, influencing our interactions more than we think.

The power of priming could be used in a number of ways, stating that the influence which it

has on behavior can’t be negligible. For example, the study realized by Légal, Chappé,

Coiffard & Villard-Forest (2012) shows that priming “trust” had significant results, leading to
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a better understanding of the message, a rise in behavior intentions and a positive influence in

evaluating its source.

Ottati, Wilson, and Lambert ( 2016 ) wrote about the priming’s influence in people’s lives, for

example information from media primes us to give more importance to certain issues raised

by politicians (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987 apud. Ottati, Wilson, & Lambert, 2016); moreover

people that were exposed longer to the image of a candidate are predisposed to increase the

probability to recognize the candidate’s name and their perceived electability (Kam &

Zechmeister, 2013 apud. Ottati, Wilson, & Lambert, 2016).

The political world is not the only one who benefits from this theory, military also has

something to gain from it. Different studies underline the importance of priming in

aggression. One of them used pairs of words-images, and the researchers observed that the

participants had a quicker response to aggressive words when they were primed with

aggressive images, but also with images that portrayed alcohol (Bartholow & Heinz, 2006

apud. Benjamin & Bushman, 2016). A study in China showed that the effects of priming

works on children between the ages between 9 and 13, and the effects of weapons was

stronger on boys (Zhang, Tian, Cao, Zhang, & Rodkin, 2016 apud. Benjamin & Bushman,

2016).

Another useful thing that priming does is to lower the effect of depletion on auto control tasks

if you induce goal priming. Also priming auto control goals increases the level of assuming

the task (Walsh, 2014).

Another domain that benefits from priming is communication. Pickering, McLean and

Krayeva (2015) showed that when narrators were primed with words associated with

helpfulness, they gave more details to the auditorium than the narrators who were primed with

words associated with unhelpfulness.

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A study that investigated the relationship between semantic memory, priming and episodic

memory, in which there were used 200 pictures divided in four categories of animals (ex.:

bovines, felines, rodents, monkeys), and each category had more species ( in the felines there

were, cheetahs, lions etc.), showed that priming is influenced by our prior knowledge, the

answers being faster for the least familiar category (rodents) (Kühnel, Dal Maș, Reichelt, &

Markowitsch, 2013).

Another study that involves memory, investigated if false memory priming can be applied to

complex thinking tasks, respectively in analog tasks ( a is for b,, what c is for d), and the

results showed that problem solving speed was improved when participants are primed with

false memories, and the results are not affected by age, but there were no advantages when

participants were primed with real memories (Howe, Threadgold, Norbury, Garner, & Ball,

2013).

When we take a decision or we search for an answer we use anchors, either generated by us,

or by others. Chaxel (2013) showed that priming influences anchoring no matter if it’s self

generated or it’s generated by the experimenter, also in the comparing drawings tasks they

were asked to search for resemblances, participants gave answers closer to the anchor, than

when they were asked to find differences. But when the cognitive load was big the similarity

and differences conditions lost their effect and when the cognitive load was small, participants

who were primed with the similarity condition had a better probability to be biased.

Although these examples show the power of priming, not all studies concur. For example,

replicating DeWall’s experiment with a considerable amount of participants, it infirmed the

hypotheses according to heat priming has a positive influence on hostility, the results showed

that there isn’t a significant effect (Mccarthy & Randy, 2014).

These results may seem surprising contradicting not only the original hypotheses but also the

common sense, in spite all this common sense does not always fail. Data from the study
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conducted by Dal Mas, Kühnel, Reicheilt, Markowitschi and Piefke (2013) supports the

hypotheses which states that colorful stimuli (vs. black and white stimuli) amplifies the

effects of perceptual priming.

Although there are evidence for the functionality and the utility of priming, a meta-analysis

done by Weingarten et al. in 2016 showed that more valued behaviors had a stronger priming

effect, but overall in every study that was analyzed the size effect of priming was small (

d=0.332), which it is consistent with another discovery which states that opportunities for

goal satisfaction lowers priming effect.

In conclusion, there should be more meta-analysis on priming, not to become “the poster child

for doubts about the integrity of psychological research” (Kahneman, 2012).

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References

Benjamin, A. & Bushman, B. (2016). The Weapons Priming Effect. Current Opinion In Psychology.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.05.003

Bless, H. & Burger, A. (2016). Assimilation and contrast in social priming. Current Opinion In

Psychology, 12, 26-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.018

Chaxel, A. (2014). The impact of procedural priming of selective accessibility on self-generated and

experimenter-provided anchors. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 50, 45-51.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.09.005

Dal Mas, D., Kühnel, S., Reichelt, B., Markowitsch, H., & Piefke, M. (2013). Influence of Color on

Perceptual Priming: A Picture Fragment Completion Paradigm. Procedia - Social And

Behavioral Sciences, 82, 482-486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.06.296

Howe, M., Threadgold, E., Norbury, J., Garner, S., & Ball, L. (2013). Priming children’s and adults’

analogical problem solutions with true and false memories. Journal Of Experimental Child

Psychology, 116(1), 96-103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2013.03.006

Kühnel, S., Dal Mas, D., Reichelt, B., & Markowitsch, H. (2013). The Alliance between Semantic

Memory, Priming, and Episodic Memory. Procedia - Social And Behavioral Sciences, 82,

562-566. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.06.310

Légal, J., Chappé, J., Coiffard, V., & Villard-Forest, A. (2012). Don't you know that you want to trust

me? Subliminal goal priming and persuasion. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology,

48(1), 358-360. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.06.006

Loersch, C. & Keith Payne, B. (2016). Demystifying priming. Current Opinion In Psychology, 12,

32-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.020
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McCarthy, R. (2014). Close replication attempts of the heat priming-hostile perception effect.

Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 165-169.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.014

Ottati, V., Wilson, C., & Lambert, A. (2016). Accessibility, priming, and political judgment. Current

Opinion In Psychology, 12, 1-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.010

Pickering, M., McLean, J., & Krayeva, M. (2015). Nonconscious priming of communication. Journal

Of Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 77-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.12.007

Smith, E. & Mackie, D. (2016). Influence from representations of others’ responses: social priming

meets social influence. Current Opinion In Psychology, 12, 22-25.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.012

Walsh, D. (2014). Attenuating depletion using goal priming. Journal Of Consumer Psychology,

24(4), 497-505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.05.001

Weingarten, E., Chen, Q., McAdams, M., Yi, J., Hepler, J., & Albarracin, D. (2016). On Priming

Action: Conclusions from a Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally-

Presented Words. Current Opinion In Psychology.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.015