Priming Your Readers

by Robison Wells

Last week I read the most fascinating book I've read in years: Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Dr. Ariely is a behavioral economist at MIT. (If you're like me, you've never heard of behavioral economics ever in your whole life. Basically, it's a backwards approach to economics: rather than studying economics theory of how the market should work (such as supply and demand theory, etc), behavioral economics studies how people actually act: how the market does work.)

The title and subtitle of the book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, pretty much sums up behavioral economics. A huge portion of the decisions we make are based on weird quirks of the subconscious, not on logic, reason, or judgement.

An example: study after study indicates that we humans can't for the life of us logically determine the value of anything. In one study, participants wrote down the last two digits of their social security number, and put a dollar sign next to it. Then they were asked to compare that dollar amount to six products and determine if they'd pay that much for the item. So, for example, if your SS# ends in 75, then you'd compare $75 to six products: would you pay $75 for a bottle of wine? A trackball mouse? A box of Godiva chocolates? Participants were then asked to indicate the highest amount that they'd actually pay for the item. And the verdict: people with higher social security numbers were always willing to pay more! The reason is this: we can't judge value very well, so we rely on our first impressions as anchors, even if those first impressions are completely aribtrary. A person with a SS# of 75 might say "I won't pay $75 for that trackball mouse, but I'd pay $60", while someone with a SS# of 15 would say "$15 is probably too low for that trackball mouse, but I'd pay $30." The study was performed over hundreds of intelligent people--students at MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale!--and the results was always the same: we have a terrible time determining values.

Quite honestly, you should just read the whole dang book, because every chapter is more fascinating than the one before it. Dozens of times throughout the week I found myself hurrying into the other room to read bits to my wife, and I think I've talked about it with everyone in my neighborhood.

While the book is all great, there was a section toward the end that got me thinking about writing. (Yes, I know that I never actually talk about writing on this writing blog. But now I'm going to.)

There is a technique in psychological experimentation called Priming. Priming, basically, is a process of introducing ideas subconciously to a person, and then seeing how they respond.

In one experiment, researchers looked at the effect of stereotypes on Asian American women. There is a stereotype that women aren't very good at math, but there is also a stereotype that Asians are really good at math. So, the researchers gave a math test to a large group of Asian American women; they had exactly the same math problems, but half of the tests began with questions about race issues (such as "What languages are spoken in your home?" and "How long has your family lived in the United States?") and the other half of the tests began with questions related to gender ("How do you feel about coed dorms?", etc). And guess what the researchers found? When Asian American women were reminded that they were Asian-American, they did well on the math test. And when they were reminded that they were women, they did significantly worse. They were being subconsiously "primed" to meet a stereotype, and their behavior on the test fulfilled their expectations.

Another priming experiment: two groups of people were given a jumble of words they were supposed to unscramble. For one group, these words were negative: "aggressive", "rude", "annoying", "intrusive". For the other group, the words were positive: "honor", "considerate", "polite", "sensitive". The participants thought they were just unscrambling words, but really they were being primed positively or negatively. When they had finished, they went into the next room, where they had been told to get instructions from another researcher. However, the researcher (actually an actor) was busy, trying to explain a complex thought to another researcher/actor. The real experiment had nothing to do with how fast these partipants finished the word unscrambling, but how quickly they interrupt the researchers. And, not surprisingly, those who had been primed with negative words were much faster to interrupt: they did so after about 5.5 minutes, whereas the positively primed people waited an average of 9.3 minutes.

One last example: This last experiment is the one that is most interesting to me, and the one that made me connect priming to writing. A group of undergraduate students at NYU were primed (using the same unscrambling technique) with words related to the elderly: "bingo", "Florida", "ancient", etc. (A second, control group was primed with general, neutral words.) When the people finished unscrambling and returned their papers to the researchers, they were told they were done. They left the room and headed down the hall. But this is where the real experiment started. The people who had been primed with elderly words walked significantly slower down the hallway than those who had the neutral words! And these were 20-year-old kids!

So, writing. The third book I wrote (which hasn't been published) was about a group of people stranded in the barren deserts of New Mexico. When I finished it, I sent it out to readers to get feedback. One of the comments I got, which I don't think I ever understood until now, was that someone said the book made them thirsty. Now, it's not like I've done a study to see if the reader actually got thirsty, simply because they read words like "parched" and "dry" and "cracked" and "dessicated". But, if "bingo" and "Florida" can make a person walk slower--to act elderly--why couldn't my words actually make someone want a drink of water?

It's given me new drive with my writing. If words really do have this much subconscious power--and overwhelming evidence suggests that they do--think of how we can further enhance the reading experience! Priming is essentially evoking mood, and I know that many authors are already doing this very well, whether or not they're aware of the psychological basis for it. But I know that I can do better. I'm excited to try.