Page 146 - The Social Animal

128 The Social Animal

the participants, the anagram task exposed them to different kinds
of words; some participants saw words related to rudeness (intrude,
disturb), whereas others saw more neutral words. Later when it was
time to fetch the experimenter, the participants found him in the
hallway deeply engaged in a conversation with another person.
Compared with the participants primed with neutral words, those
who had seen words associated with rudeness were far more likely
to interrupt the conversation.
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In a similar study, after being primed with words either consis-
tent with the stereotype of old people (Florida, retirement, senile) or
with unrelated words, participants were observed walking down the
hallway away from the experiment. Those primed with the elderly
stereotype walked significantly more slowly—like the old people
they were primed to think about. For brief periods of time, at least,
we can “become” whomever or whatever pops into our mind.
Priming can and does have a major impact on the attitudes and
behavior of many people—even of seasoned professionals in life-
and-death situations in the real world. For example, consider experi-
enced physicians who work with AIDS patients. One might imagine
that they would have a clear, solid idea about their own risk of infec-
tion. Linda Heath and her colleagues found that this is not neces-
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sarily the case. They asked several hundred physicians about their
perceived risk of contracting HIV on the job. For one group of physi-
cians, Heath primed their thoughts about the danger by getting them
to imagine their being exposed to the virus while doing their work.
The assessment of risk of these physicians was deeply affected by the
priming. Specifically, those physicians who were instructed to imag-
ine themselves being exposed to HIV on the job subsequently felt
that there was a significantly higher risk of their being infected than
did those who were not primed. This was true regardless of the ex-
tent of the physicians’ actual experiences with HIV-infected patients.
Let us look at priming in the mass media. Several studies have
shown that there is a link between which stories the media cover and
what viewers consider to be the most important issues of the day. 19
In other words, the mass media make certain issues and concepts
readily accessible and thereby set the public’s political and social
agendas. To take one example, in a pioneering study of an election in
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North Carolina, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw found that
the issues voters came to consider most important in the campaign