We Are What We Read

There are so many interesting psychological tidbits in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink that you'd have to rewrite the book to get them all into a summary. The gist is: how do human beings make snap decisions, and why are snap decisions so often correct. It's all fascinating, but one aspect of his multifaceted examination of the topic really caught my imagination. The concept of priming. (This is a cross post from my other blog, but there's a religious element at the end that I thought was worth sharing here as well...)

Gladwell recounts how in a study, researchers tested subjects' reactions to a simple word test. Peppered through the test were words on a particular topic: Florida, wrinkle, gray, etc. that taken together would lead the subject to think of aging. But the words weren't placed so obviously that the subject would consciously put them together. So while the conscious mind focused on the quiz, the unconscious mind found the pattern in the words and conditioned the body to respond to that pattern: in this case by making the test subjects walk more slowly, as though they had themselves aged, after leaving the test room. The priming experiments worked in a variety of situations, conditioning students to do better on tests after being primed to think of professors, or to behave more politely or patiently in an annoying situation than a group who hadn't received the same priming.

This isn't brainwashing, but it is conditioning, and I think, especially because it a conditioning that works on the subconscious, the implications are amazing. We are deeply affected by the sea of words and images and ideas we swim through each day, and perhaps more deeply even by those on the periphery of our attention. You are what you read.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with Rick once about certain, very simple religious stories can have very complicated theological repercussions by "wiring" the brain for certain kinds of belief, or the ability to experience faith in general. (Santa Claus may be a story like this.) I know the concepts are different, but they feel related somehow…

It seems as though there are possibly religious implications in this, whether in terms of our religious practices priming us to experience the numinous, scripture reading priming us for contemplation of God, or children's stories priming us for faith. And of course, one could take a negative position, that the experience of religion is somehow the result of priming experiences rather than an genuine object of that faith... to which at least one response might be that those cues needed to come from somewhere; in the original example above the experimenters were only able to prime the subjects to walk slowly by using words that connote age because there is such a thing as "old" to begin with.