The Hot and Cold of Priming
Psychologists are divided on whether unnoticed cues can influence behavior
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/340408/title/The_Hot_and_Cold_of_Priming
This is an interesting idea, though it appears to be a bit challenging to reproduce. I am dubious about a lot of social science reports because they tend to have very high noise to signal ratios and statistical significance, to me, anyway, tends to ride right along the cutting edge where it is very easy to say the result was due to chance and not something real. I suspect, also, that priming people is highly culturally dependent, so working to replicate the same results in a different culture might lead to no results simply because of the strong tie to culture. Personally I think that the average human is very easy to prime, at least the average American, because of all the stupid shit I see in politics. Since I see people believing stuff that is demonstrability false all the time I expect that there is a huge element bias built into people’s cognitive capabilities. If you happen to design an experiment that is testing this bias, I would expect a very substantial statistically significant result. However, if you test something that doesn’t trigger bias in your experimental group, you might get nothing.
Then there is the self-selection that goes into participating in these sorts of experiments. I like this line from Kay in ‘Men in Black’: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” Looking at individuals who have consented to be part of a psychology experiment is different from looking at groups of people who are not consenting.
