Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:45Josh Clark?

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• 1:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:14Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, Charles W. Chuck Bryant, the best all around boy. And there's Jerry Rowland, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I really wish I hadn't have told you that. I think I've, I think I've told you that before though, so you forgot the first time. So maybe you'll forget again.

• 1:33Josh Clark?

  I can't, you know how people keep lists of like, episodes we say we should do or movies we've mentioned or something like that? They should keep a list of the different things that we've talked about and then completely forgot we talked about, because I'm sure it would be extensive.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, big list.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  So speaking of big lists, Chuck, we're talking today about priming, which is the present tense of primus. And what it refers to is a, it's a psychological term where you are prompted to respond in a certain way, behave in a certain way, choose a certain selection based on some prompt that was given to you without your knowledge. It could either be so flashed so fast or something on a computer screen that your, your conscious awareness didn't pick up on it.

• 2:26Josh Clark?

  Or it could just be presented to you in a way that you're not, you're not aware that it's actually related to the thing that you're being, say, tested on.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And this is a big, big thing in cognitive psychology. And, you know, we're going to kind of get into the ins and outs of it. Some of it, there's a, there's a lot of, for some of it, there's a lot of studies that sort of indicate that there's a lot to it. There's another part of this that we'll get to where there's a lot of studies that aren't so great, or that have been fudged, or data's been massaged, or completely fabricated, where it seems like sometimes they've been found out, as far as researchers go. But it all comes down to memory. And if you're, if you're talking to a cognitive psychologist, they'll say that you have a couple of ways that you remember things.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  One is your explicit memory, or your active or conscious memory. Like, if you're trying to think of something, and you're actively engaged your memory to think of a thing, that's what that is.

• 3:28Josh Clark?

  Like, if somebody asked, like, what was Chuck's senior superlative in high school? I would think back to a fact that I learned, and I would say, "Best all-around boy."

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Is it gonna be one of those?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  And then implicit memory is the other one, and that's just what you remember on an unconscious level. So if someone asked me, "What was your senior superlative?", wouldn't even have to think about it. "Best all-around boy", boom, it just pops right out as if it were my name.

• 3:56Josh Clark?

  Right. So those are, and this is really kind of like breaking it down to a really rough, basic level. It's much more complex than that. But we bring that up because it's your, it's tapping into the different ways that you access memories that priming is based on.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16Josh Clark?

  And you said it falls under the, the rubric of cognitive psychology.

• 4:22Josh Clark?

  And that is true. Cognitive psychology has shown very clearly that this actually works. That if you give somebody, say, a word and you show them a list of associated words, it's going to just happen that they're able to pick out the associated word faster than other words. Well, we'll give you some examples. Rather than just me mushing it all together. Let's tease it out a little bit, like an 80s perm.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, boy. Yeah, let's do that. So because I think if we give some of these examples, it'll make a little more sense. For instance, this first exercise that Dave helped us out with this. Dave found this one is called the lexical decision. And that is the idea that if you put a word up on a screen for a couple of seconds as a priming word, then you, as the subject, will indicate the next word on the screen, if it's a real word or if it's a nonsense word. But that will be influenced, that's your lexical decision you're making, that will be influenced by that priming word that you saw. So in this case, Dave used the example, doctor. You're sitting there in the lab. Bill Murray's on the other side. Got the shocker all ready.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Doctor pops up on the screen for a couple of seconds. That's your priming word. And then all of a sudden, other words pop up after that. And our job as the subject is to see, is to say whether that's a real word or a nonsense word. And obviously, you would think, if the word nurse pops up, you're going to be recognizing that a lot faster. So it's all about sort of the speed at which you recognize this as a real or nonsense word. Nurse would be a much faster decision than if it was basketball.

• 6:05Josh Clark?

  Right. And it's basically words that share a similar category are more easily accessed once you've been primed. Almost like the way that we sort things is by putting them into large categories, like doctor, nurse, hospital, stethoscope, right? And then once you open that category by thinking of doctor, you're going to be able to access the other stuff in that category much more easily than, say, something in a Totally different category like cheese in the same category is delicious, that kind of stuff, right?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, or basketball.

• 6:38Josh Clark?

  That's, that seems, for sure. That seems like what it's tapping into. And it actually seems to reveal that that's kind of how we, we store memories. There's another, 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.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Poop.

• 7:20Josh Clark?

  Sure, or soup.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 7:22Josh Clark?

  I think would be a good one, right?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:24Josh Clark?

  And depending on whether you're, you know how to spell, you might spell it with an O or U, doesn't matter. You're still getting the point across.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Right. Or in another example of the same, you know, 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 a missing letter.

• 8:00Josh Clark?

  Right. And then there's also another, 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.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 9:21Josh Clark?

  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.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Deion Sanders just moonwalks through the background.

• 9:38Josh Clark?

  Right. So we know that this is true also, not just because study after study has shown that this is actually correct, but when you put somebody in the wonder machine, the fMRI.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Got to do it.

• 9:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they found that if you ask somebody the name of, let's say, Anya Taylor-Joy, say, who was the star of The Witch, but also The Gorge, which isn't that good.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I thought that was fairly entertaining for a not great movie, by the way.

• 10:09Josh Clark?

  The Gorge?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was highly watchable on like a rainy, not feeling so great day kind of movie way.

• 10:14Josh Clark?

  Agreed.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:16Josh Clark?

  Agreed. It just, wow, it takes a sudden turn. It's just really surprising. But yes, I agree. I think that's a good way to put it. You would stop and think like, oh, Anya Taylor-Joy. And by the way, the Queen's Gambit is one of the best things I've ever seen in my entire life.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the chess one?

• 10:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  That was great.

• 10:35Josh Clark?

  Okay, but if you also said, you know, name a, name a animal that you think of when we'd say the word dog, what they found in the FMRI is that different parts of your brain light up. So we do know that priming does have a certain effect and it is different than our normal kind of conscious recall.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  I wonder if when they, they go into the FMRI wonder machine room now, the person running it just goes, I'm telling you what's going to happen, some, a part will light up and then another part will light up and you'll all be super happy.

• 11:10Josh Clark?

  You've been primed.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  You've been primed and Dion just very slowly moonwalks.

• 11:16Josh Clark?

  So, okay, that's cognitive priming. Now imagine if you were a psychologist and you said cognitive priming is kind of boring. What if we could use that same stuff to get people to eat more cheeseburgers?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Josh Clark?

  Or to vote for a particular candidate in a political election?

• 11:36Josh Clark?

  Like, what if priming works for that?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's, you know, it's all fun and games to just sort of look at these little experiments on a, on a campus somewhere, but if it has a real world use, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising and stuff like that, you can bet corporations are going to sink some money into doing that.

• 11:56Josh Clark?

  Yes, so this is the handoff right here between cognitive psychology to social psychology. And social psychology has studied priming in great detail. It was a huge hit. You'll, you'll remember back to Nudge Economics, we talked about it in our PR live episode. Like, it was a big deal in like the late aughts to about the 2012, I think, something like that. It was just a big deal. And it makes a lot of sense, like, the, it's the basis of, of things like ideas like McDonald's uses red and yellow in its logo because those colors are associated with excitement or energy, your happiness, or they call it a happy meal because over time, you'll, your,

• 12:41Josh Clark?

  your kid will associate McDonald's with being happy. I'm loving it. It's just a jingle or whatever and it makes sense. It's very catchy. But there's some part of your mind that it has been primed to later on, associate McDonald's with love, a positive feeling. All of this is examples of social psychology research, supporting this idea that you can prime human beings to behave in a certain way, just by using these same techniques that cognitive psychologists prove work, dog, cat, soup, soap, that kind of stuff.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, as long as you beat them over the head with it over and over and over again, because repetition is one of the real keys here.

• 13:22Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Your brain just being repeatedly exposed to that stimuli is gonna, you know, strengthen that association over time. And brands know that. And that's why it drives you crazy during, you know, especially like sports playoffs or something, when you see those same ads over and over and over again.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It's a, it's big business. They're putting a lot of money into, into, you know, sort of manipulating your brain, essentially.

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I've said it before and I'll say it again. For some reason, some ad exec chose morning reruns of Murder She Wrote on Start TV, over the air channel network, for the Burger King terrible singing ad.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  There had to be some research into their viewership or something, right?

• 14:08Josh Clark?

  It had to be, but the thing is, every single other ad is for like Humana, life insurance, or health insurance, or dental insurance, because you're, you're, you just retired and now you have Medicaid. Like, every other ad.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 14:22Josh Clark?

  It almost stood out. You know what I mean?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Well, you know, our, our senior friends in the world are very concerned about their health and their healthcare, and they still love those cheeseburgers. That's two things we know.

• 14:35Josh Clark?

  I guess that's it. But it was, it really grated on my nerves, because I watch that almost every day.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  All right. Why don't we take a break here? That's a good table setting, I think. And we'll get back to how this is used in media and politics. Should be no surprise, right after this.

• 15:22Speaker 02

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• 15:34Josh Clark?

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• 15:57Josh Clark?

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• 16:09Speaker 02

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• 16:25Josh Clark?

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• 16:34Speaker 02

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• 16:47Josh Clark?

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• 17:03Speaker 02

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• 17:28Josh Clark?

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• 17:45Speaker 02

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• 18:00Josh Clark?

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• 18:13Speaker 02

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• 18:54Speaker 02

  All right, so we're back. As promised, we're going to talk a little bit about the media and politics. Hopefully in a way that's just sort of quick and easy and doesn't ruffle too many feathers, because what we've seen is that is media of all stripes do this, and politicians of all stripes do this. So it's not singling anybody out. But when the media gets involved in this kind of thing to shape public opinion, they do so with sort of a three-pronged fork, which is agenda-setting, framing, and priming. Agenda-setting being like, hey, what's, what are we going to focus on editorially, maybe in today's paper? Or every day until the election? How are you going to frame this thing to suit what we feel is probably our slant?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  And then priming. It's basically, you know, it's similar to the first two, but this is the subconscious things where we're going to repeat things. We're going to use certain words, certain images, as to just sort of reinforce how we framed it.

• 19:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so just for a quick example, let's say the news decides to focus on crime and that the framing they use is that crime is on the rise. And you hear about this over and over again, night after night on the news, or you read about it over and over again on your favorite news site. Eventually, you're going to be primed to think that crime is on the rise and you might even be a little scared of it. Or relating to politics, a politician might latch on to that and be like, crime's really hot right now, we're gonna make crime like the the main point. We're gonna use it to set the agenda of our campaign and we're going to tap into that fear that this person, this lack of safety that the people out there watching the news

• 20:39Josh Clark?

  feel because they're being told over and over again, crime is on the rise. Whether it is or not is irrelevant.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no data there.

• 20:45Josh Clark?

  They feel that it is. Exactly. They feel that that crime is on the rise, so we, a politician, are going to tap into that and use it to hopefully get an election because now we can prime them to get that emotional response out of them over and over again until we finally move them to the voting stations to to vote for me, the politician.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  That's right. I'd vote for you, by the way.

• 21:08Josh Clark?

  I would never, ever run for public office.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Oh, of course you wouldn't, but I would.

• 21:14Josh Clark?

  Never.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  I would vote for you for like, you know, neighborhood watch or something.

• 21:17Josh Clark?

  Would you vote for me for best all-around boy?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I mean, you got that one in the bag, buddy. You don't need my vote.

• 21:25Josh Clark?

  Thank you.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Dog whistling is something that, you know, you've heard more and more as a sort of a term used in, you know, social media, politics, on the news, stuff like that. And that is when you use a word or a phrase that you sort of are in, not sort of, you are very much intentionally associating with a negative racial stereotype, but it's not explicit. So it operates on the unconscious level. And this is where they tap into implicit bias, something that everybody has. And, you know, using these coded words, basically, there are things that I'm, I will never take one of these, it scares me to death, so I would never sit down for an implicit bias

• 22:10Speaker 02

  test because I don't want to know what my implicit biases are. It's absolutely terrifying because we all have them. I guess that's probably cowardly and I should know what my implicit biases are so I can try and correct those. But it's basically when they sit you down and you say, all right, respond very quickly, as quick as you can to a series of images or words. And anything within 200 and 600 milliseconds is your implicit memory. Anything after that, you're thinking about and that's explicit memory.

• 22:42Josh Clark?

  Right. Two things about that. One, if implicit bias is a universal thing and everybody has it, you're free. You don't have to feel as bad about it. I mean, it's definitely something you should work to correct if you can, but you don't have to feel like it's just you.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:59Josh Clark?

  That's one thing. And then the second thing too, Chuck, is if it is true that we all are implicitly biased, say like along racial lines. I feel like you could explain it by saying, by, it's an example of our evolutionary history not being caught up yet to our current social history. Like when we form modern societies, we jumped light years ahead as far as evolution goes. And the way that we think and see the world just completely just hit warp speed. But evolutionarily, there's still a big lag catching up to it.

• 23:40Josh Clark?

  So we're fearful of people who don't look like us or have a slightly different culture or live in a different nation, just evolutionarily speaking, even though we know we shouldn't feel that way, that that's not actually how things are, that conflict between those two things is what the real issue is.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, boy. That really lets us all off the hook, I guess.

• 24:02Josh Clark?

  Right. So we don't have to do anything about it. It'll work itself out in 10,000 years.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing though, is when they, when people sit down for these tests, they found that even people who explicitly disagree with any kind of racial stereotyping, like I would never do that, I don't have those at all, they even, well, I was about to say fail those tests, they even chart on those tests as showing implicit bias.

• 24:25Josh Clark?

  Right. So we've, we've made it pretty squarely into social psychology territory right now. And there were some, there were some early experiments trying to figure out how you can persuade people using priming.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Right. It's like the seventies, right?

• 24:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, late seventies, early eighties. And so one of the first ones came out in 1979. And it was a social psychology experiment where you gave people scrambled, like a scrambled word list and said, make a sentence out of this.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:58Josh Clark?

  And so you would get something neutral like her found new I. And I knew her is a sentence you could make out of that. Or you would give something like leg break arm his. You could say break his arm. And so one group was given more hostile word scrambles to make sentences out of. The other was more neutral. And then that was part one. After that, they were asked to, to consider a hypothetical scenario in which somebody's kind of ambiguously responding or interacting with somebody. I think I saw that Donald is refusing to pay rent

• 25:38Josh Clark?

  until his landlord paints his apartment. And the people who were given the hostile word scrambles rated Donald as much more hostile than the people who were given the neutral word scrambles. So what they're showing is that you can nudge people toward forming an impression about someone they know basically nothing about. Based on priming them to feel one way or another about them. And then that was like, if we can do that, man, what else can we do? That really opened the floodgates.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, we're about to tick through a series of little things like that that might be mind blowing for you. Where you're like, oh my God, I can't believe that works. But just, you know, sort of put, put that in your pocket for now.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  There was one study where it was, again, it was unscrambling sentences. Half the people were given sentences that had words that were, you know, like healthy or healthy and active lifestyle words. The other half got neutral words and. Afterward, they said, all right, you guys are great. You can go ahead and leave there. You can, you can, you know, go up the stairs there and get out of here to the parking deck up there, or you can take the elevator. And people who unscrambled the healthy words were more likely to take the stairs afterward. So, you know, they're like, hey, that's pretty much proof right there. They'd been primed with these healthy words to make a healthier decision afterward.

• 27:00Josh Clark?

  Right. And well, like you said, we'll talk about some of the more shocking or surprising studies. But before that, we need to mention a guy named John Barg, who became basically the rock star of this field. Starting in the 90s, he essentially wrote a paper that said, like, all of this is possible. Like, here's how you do that. Here's how you take the findings of cognitive priming and turn it into social or behavioral priming. And he was very famous for a couple of studies, many studies, but there's two that really stuck out to me that. Let me give you an example. One is that he tested whether something is as random as

• 27:43Josh Clark?

  temperature could affect your impression of another person.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought that was interesting because it was like they'd use words and finally like, hey, I wonder if words worked if images only alone could work. And then he was like, hold my beer. What about just temperature alone? So in this one, he asked participants to hold a something warm, like a cup of coffee or warm cup of soup or something, or a frosty cold beverage. And then they bring them in a room where they have a conversation with a stranger. And they found that, or he found, he claimed to find, that people who were primed with that warm beverage had a warmer impression of that stranger afterward. And people who had that cold beverage frostier had a, you know, they felt frostier toward that person.

• 28:28Josh Clark?

  Right. So that means that you can nudge people to feel a certain way based on metaphor, priming using metaphor and not even words or images, but temperature.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:39Josh Clark?

  Another one that he figured out was, and this is the one he's really famous for, I think this is the one that came from his 1996 paper. But he, he tested to see how certain kinds of words affect certain kinds of behavior. And he took some 19, 20, 21 year old students and had them do that famous word scramble. Priming researchers love word scrambles.

• 29:05Josh Clark?

  And some had just a normal neutral set of words to pick out from. Another had sets of words that were associated with being old, but not so straight ahead that you'd be like, these are all old people words. But they were like bingo, or Florida, or wrinkles, that kind of stuff, right? That was part one. And then the students who were participating thought that they were done at that point. But he said, okay, now we've got to do part two, but we're going to have to go to the end of the hall and turn right. And there's another lab we need to go to for the second part of this test. But the real thing he was doing was clocking how long it took the students to make it from one end of the hall to the other.

• 29:49Josh Clark?

  And he found the people who had worked with word scrambles that had age or elder-related words walked slower than the people who had the neutral words. And this was the one, this experiment, Chuck, is what broke open. This is what led to nudge economics. This is what led to governments saying like, man, we could use this to like move people in a way that we want them to, that's healthier and happier. This is the study that did that.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and here's my, I mean, I hope I'm not giving anything away for act three when we sort of rain down our judgment upon this stuff. But like, even when I was first going through this, I was like, I even know there are so many variables to account for in these experiments that there's no way they're accounting for them. Like the taking the stairs or taking the elevator. 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.

• 31:06Josh Clark?

  I think we can just go ahead and, and reveal now.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 31:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:35Josh Clark?

  If that seems ridiculous to you, you are 100% right.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:39Josh Clark?

  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.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  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, or a political party would really latch on to this when they see stuff like this.

• 32:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  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, hmm, something smells fishy.

• 32:33Josh Clark?

  Can you imagine reading that in the scholarly journal and being like, man, that's, that's really crazy.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I would say this paper smells like tuna.

• 32:42Josh Clark?

  Um, there's another one, remember power poses? I specifically remember John Hodgman realizing that I was nervous backstage at the Bell House once and telling me to do a power pose.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 32:52Josh Clark?

  To get over my stage fright. And I was like, this isn't working. Reason it doesn't work is because that was a finding from priming research.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Did you, did you text him and say, you're full of crap?

• 33:06Josh Clark?

  No, I'm gonna let him hear this episode.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:10Josh Clark?

  There's another one. If you make a frowny face and you're shown upsetting pictures, you will self-report, that should be a red flag in and of itself, that you were upset by pictures of starving children, people arguing, accident victims that had been maimed, more than people who weren't making a frowny face at the time they saw the pictures.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's one that's interesting to me. Money primed people are more selfish. So if you're, I guess they did this experiment with people who made a lot of money and people who didn't?

• 33:44Josh Clark?

  I think it was they were winning money in like games.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay. But the long and short of it is, if you were one of the money people, quote unquote, then you would not, if someone spilled their pencils, like one of the researchers, like, oh, look at me, I spilled all these pencils, they wouldn't pick up as many pencils as someone who didn't have the money. So people without money are kinder.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  I can see where that's going in a way, but there are also just so many variables in that.

• 34:12Josh Clark?

  Right, right. And also, if your study is, is supporting just a general moral judgment against a certain group.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:20Josh Clark?

  It may have been biased in and of itself, right?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  That's a good point.

• 34:25Josh Clark?

  There's another, I love this one.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  These last two are great.

• 34:28Josh Clark?

  If you think about stabbing a coworker in the back, metaphorically, you are more inclined when given a choice to buy soap detergent or disinfectant than you are to buy batteries, juice, or candy bars.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Out damn spot.

• 34:44Josh Clark?

  Yes, exactly. Why don't you give him the last one, Chuck?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Okay, if, if you were in this experiment, you were induced to lie to an imaginary person, either in an email or a phone call, and then in a test that followed that, of the desirability of different products, people who lied on the, people who lied on the telephone, they actually said the lie out loud, preferred mouthwash over soap, and people who typed it out and lied in the email preferred soap to mouthwash.

• 35:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The first group preferred mouthwash to soap unless the soap was Lifebuoy.

• 35:22Josh Clark?

  So, okay, yes, we should probably rein it back a little bit.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:25Josh Clark?

  Because our bias is showing, but for good reason. I mean, we should say priming is not just this point of ridicule. This, this, it just, the bottom fell out of this really hot, super sexy field of research that everyone had bought into like a mudslide going down a mountain. Like, it just erupted. It was, it went so south, so fast, that today, about, about almost 15 years on, since the, everybody was like, this is all made up. It's, it's, it's essentially a discredited field. Like, there's almost no one working in this anymore, because most people are like, this isn't true.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not to say that they're, like, people didn't get a lot of, like, legitimate recognition for this stuff. Like, there were people, won Nobel Prizes, who worked on this stuff, and wrote bestselling books, who worked on this stuff, and made millions of dollars, like, speaking to corporations.

• 36:23Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  About how they can better, you know, take advantage of their consumers. So, it was, it was swallowed, hook, line, and sinker.

• 36:31Josh Clark?

  So, let's give you an example. Daniel Kahneman, he was a Nobel, already a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, and it was essentially an introduction to nudge economics and priming for the, for the, the average person. And it was a huge bestseller. I mean, everybody was reading that book back in the day. I think it was 2002, okay?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:59Josh Clark?

  In this book, he says, this is a quote, "Disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true." You have no choice but to say that this is true. So just get on board. This was like a Nobel Prize winning economist who was a psychologist himself, who wrote that to the rest of the world, saying like, don't even question priming. This is true. Let's figure out how to use it to persuade people to do what we want.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was another guy. We talked about the nudge earlier in 2008. Another Nobel winning economist named Richard Thaler co-wrote a bestseller called Nudge: "Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness." And in that book, he talked about social priming experiences, benign paternalism, or that nudge that you know, you kind of mentioned earlier toward making a better decision. And then there's this other economist named, they're all economists. Daniel, what's his name, Erle?

• 38:02Josh Clark?

  I think so, yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  And he tested a lot of these supposed nudges. In one experiment, he had kids, students grade their own tests, but before had half of them write out as many of the 10 commandments as they could remember. And what he found was that those students were less likely to cheat on their self-graded testing because they had just been primed to sort of think of like, hey, what's the right thing to do?

• 38:28Josh Clark?

  Totally makes sense. Why even question it? He worked with a car insurance company for another study. Car insurance companies will sometimes have you say how many miles you've driven in a year. And you can just lie and your insurance rates will be affected on whether you lie or not. So to find out if you could make people be more honest about that, Erle introduced an honesty pledge that the person would sign at the top of their insurance agreement or contract, saying, I won't fudge these numbers. And those people fudge their numbers less than people who didn't have that pledge to sign. So if you prompt people to be honest, whether it's the 10 commandments or pledging honesty

• 39:12Josh Clark?

  or whatever, they're going to be more honest. And that's a perfect example of the nudge economics that just swept the world at the turn of the 2000s to the 2010s.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder if they asked any of the participants coming in, are you honest generally or not?

• 39:30Josh Clark?

  Self-report.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Maybe we should take a break here. Yeah. It's a good time for a break and we'll come back and sort of talk about the big problem with all this, which is scientifically speaking, the replication of these studies, right after this.

• 40:17Josh Clark?

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• 41:44Josh Clark?

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• 42:37Speaker 02

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• 42:38Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

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• 42:45Josh Clark?

  Mm.

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• 42:50Josh Clark?

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• 43:44Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so we've talked about this before, the replication crisis in science. I think it's in the physical sciences, it's all over, where people have had these landmark papers, groundbreaking papers that have changed the world, changed how people act, changed where research dollars go. When somebody finally gets around to trying to replicate that exact same experiment, they come up with different results, often negative results. They can't replicate the results that that study found. And like I said, that's throughout science, this is a big problem. But in psychology, and more specifically, social psychology, the replication crisis is shaking the foundations of the field. And

• 44:28Josh Clark?

  a reason why, let's do a little thought experiment here. Imagine that you're a social psychologist researcher, and you're at the university, and you've come up with an experiment that you believe the results of which will be used at corporations, political campaigns, all over the place to persuade everyday people to change their behavior, which will shape the world for years to come. But you don't really feel like leaving your office that day, so you just bring in a bunch of students, maybe 15 of them, experiment on them, and then extrapolate those findings to a human universality. And then it gets packaged and exported to corporations and political campaigns. That in a nutshell is

• 45:12Josh Clark?

  social psychology.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's what happened. We have some specific examples of like, like real malfeasance that happened in these studies, in some cases even, not just like, you know, they didn't account for all the variables. Like, in some cases, they massaged data, that Daniel Errely guy that we were talking about, and his colleague Francesca Gino, they were accused of massaging the data just to fit their hypothesis. It turns out that car insurance company came back and said, "That data doesn't even match what we sent you and what you published in that honesty pledge situation."

• 45:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  There was another guy, a Dutch guy named Diedrich Stoppel.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  He was a big, sort of big name in this field. He fabricated studies out of whole cloth.

• 46:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. So it's bad for psychology, bad for social psychology, but priming research, it was just, this is like, it must have just felt like a bloodbath day after day if you were in the field. Just bad news after bad news. It got so bad that 10 years after he wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman wrote an open letter, but it was actually directed to John Barg, saying like, this is really bad. He said that priming research is the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research, and he warned of a coming train wreck. And was basically saying like, hey, man, you guys, I'm just a believer, I'm just a fan, you guys screwed this up, you better fix it.

• 46:47Josh Clark?

  And there's actually, I found a really great website called Replicability Index. It's a blog by Ulrich Schimack at the University of Toronto. And they have a, something called the reconstruction of a train wreck, where they go through and pick out like how Kahneman sold this to the public and misrepresented it all sorts of different ways himself. So he's passed on, RIP, I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and everything leading up to that, from what I understand, was a great career, but he just hitched his wagon to the wrong thing and then tried to distance himself from it as much as he could.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, the community that worked in that field certainly woke up and they weren't just like, ah, no, this is no big deal. They were like, alright, this is a real problem. So they tried, have tried since then to try and clean things up a bit and address what they call QRPs, or questionable research practices, of which there are many, we're going to talk about some of them right now, but one, obviously, you sort of mentioned this, was they're just really small studies. You can't make these big, huge conclusions about human behavior when you studied 12, you know, college freshmen, you know, on a Saturday morning. As part of the open science movement, and this is, this is pretty cool. I didn't know about this, but researchers are now encouraged to register their studies ahead of time, including

• 48:11Speaker 02

  what their hypothesis is before they collect the data. And that'll keep them from what's called harking, hypothesizing after results are known. So basically like, hey, here's what I think's gonna happen. Now let's do the study, but it's officially registered. So I can't sort of pick and choose what I, what I look at.

• 48:29Josh Clark?

  Right. There's another big problem called P-hacking, which is taking data and then making it work statistically so that these random flukes suddenly became statistically significant.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:42Josh Clark?

  That's a big problem. And I, that, I, I read that it's not so much that researchers were sitting there purposely massaging their data over and over and over again to tease out some results that they could publish. But it was more like they were just falling for flukes being more significant than they were. That's what I read, that that was really the big problem, that it wasn't like an entire field of bad actors.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, I sort of get it in a way. And we've talked about this in our scientific method show and other episodes too, where, you know, you put all this time and you wanna, you wanna, you want your thing to pan out that you think is true. So I get the inclination, but you can't, you can't fudge numbers. You can't look at stuff that just backs up your conclusion. You can't throw stuff in the file drawer that doesn't.

• 49:31Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  You got, and this is one of the things they talked about, the file drawer. Like, you gotta make all this stuff public. And part of the problem is the media, because they wanna write about something splashy and super interesting.

• 49:43Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  And so like, there's a lot of things at play here that go into why somebody would do this beyond just being like, you know, you're a bad person.

• 49:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And so you, there's something called publisher perish. Like you basically are advancing your careers if you get published in an academic journal. The problem is academic journals, they, they're like the media. They want it to be splashy and sexy. So they don't really publish negative results anyway. So even if you wanted to, you'd have a hard time getting it published in a legitimate journal these days. So that's a big problem. Ultimately, Chuck, the biggest problem, and this is what really tripped up social psychology. It's the drum that you've been beating this whole time. Humans are not. Predictable computers who will respond in a predictable way.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:26Josh Clark?

  If you give them a specific stimulus, that's just not how humans work.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  No. And even the same person will react on a different day to the same exact experiment depending on a host of factors.

• 50:38Josh Clark?

  Sure. So the same person will respond differently. You better believe different people will respond differently to the same stimulus. And then it also depends on who's presenting the stimulus.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 50:50Josh Clark?

  Is it being presented by a grad student who's posing as one of the participants? Or is it like a professor wearing a white lab coat for some reason? That that's definitely going to shape the information or the stimulus that's being received. And that when you put all this together, it's essentially impossible to replicate a priming study. And if you get the same results, that's essentially a statistical fluke from what I understand.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the Stanford Prison Experiment a few times. And looking back, like especially when you see the movie, I talk about who's presenting the experiment. It's like, those guards showed up, it's like, you guys, you look ridiculous, you know? You look like an 18 year old.

• 51:37Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Who painted on a mustache and put on some, you know, mirror aviator sunglasses, trying to be a prison guard.

• 51:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and developed a southern accent. That one always stuck out to me.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:47Josh Clark?

  So one reason why, I mean, when you're looking back, so we should say that there are still people, I think I did say, working in this field earnestly. But they're essentially going through and picking out what could be salvaged from it.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:59Josh Clark?

  What they're finding is that priming does work. But it, like we said, it's going to work differently for different people. There's very few universalities, if any. But one thing that they have figured out that is legit with social or behavioral priming is that you can be primed most easily and most reliably if it's pointing you in a direction you already want to go. So let's say you want to lose weight.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 52:23Josh Clark?

  If you're given a menu that has words like light or diet on it or something like that, you're more likely to choose those items than somebody who isn't interested in dieting.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 52:35Josh Clark?

  That's, that's essentially what it got reduced back to, which is just barely beyond cognitive priming, but it's legitimate. And that's where they're starting out from again. That's the current state of social priming. But just one more thing I wanted to talk about Chuck is why everyone bought into this?

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Well, uh, why do you think everyone bought into it?

• 52:56Josh Clark?

  I'll tell you why. Thank you for asking. Um, because it reduces humans to an understandable, predictable state.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, which is very easy to market and sell to.

• 53:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and understand, not feel threatened by, but also to feel superior to. I ran across one explanation called NPC theory, non-player character theory, like referencing background characters in video games. We don't think for themselves. They're just kind of automated. And something like social priming, it underscores that idea that other people are like that. I'm not like that. I can think for myself. Nobody's going to dupe me into eating a cheeseburger or voting for them.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:36Josh Clark?

  But other people, that happens too. And that's what priming research supported, that, that other people are non-player characters, which elevates your sense of superiority and your sense of intelligence while also deflating that of other people in your mind.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  I have to say though, we said the word cheeseburger so many times. I can't remember the last cheeseburger I had. All I want right now is a cheeseburger.

• 53:58Josh Clark?

  Is that right?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:00Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, we'll get you one. What kind do you want?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Well, you know, Dave said something about nasty McDonald's cheeseburgers in his article.

• 54:08Josh Clark?

  I saw that.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  I was like, what are you talking about? McDonald's? It's a classic.

• 54:12Josh Clark?

  It's the best of the best.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, Dave may not like it. Maybe he's a hardies guy.

• 54:17Josh Clark?

  Maybe he's one of those guys who eats his cheeseburgers on a brioche bun.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Oh, an egg roll.

• 54:25Josh Clark?

  Uh, you got anything else?

• 54:26Speaker 02

  I've got nothing else. See, these are always fun. I like these.

• 54:29Josh Clark?

  They are. We don't very frequently tee off on something, but it does feel good when we do once in a while. Um, Chuck just said, yeah. And as everybody who's ever listened to the podcast knows, he just unlocked listener mail.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Hey guys, I listen to your wonderful podcast about three hours a day on my way to and from work. Want to say thank you for all of that over the years. I had a very funny incident the other day, listening to the Sea Monkeys episode. I was coming home after a long day and that episode came on, I was really tired. And when I originally fell asleep against the window, I take it the person isn't driving?

• 55:06Josh Clark?

  I hope not.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  When I originally fell asleep, I was listening to the history of sea monkeys. To my surprise, though, I woke up and heard "White Supremacists and the KKK." I panicked and jumped out of my seat, thinking I had missed my stop by a long shot. And I had finished an episode and started a completely different one. I was not expecting the sea monkey episode to take that turn, you guys. I was relieved to find out that not much time had passed and I didn't miss my stop, but also a little distressed to find out the dark history of such an innocent children's product.

• 55:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  I live in Istanbul as a foreigner, and your podcast gives me a little taste of home. It's comforting on those days when I want to tune into two smart guys talking about something interesting. Really appreciate you for all the work you do and all the fun moments you've given me on the bus. And that is from Katie Szenler.

• 55:52Josh Clark?

  Katie knows how to speak our language, doesn't she?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Katie really knows.

• 55:56Josh Clark?

  She knows how to flatter. Thanks a lot, Katie. Have fun in Istanbul. That's very exciting and thrilling, and I'm glad you did not miss your stop. If you want to be like Katie and let us know where you live and some funny story about stuff you should know, we love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to [email protected].

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 56:36Josh Clark?

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