You are what you read

You know how, when you take snowboarding lessons, they teach you to look in the direction you want to go, not at obstacles you want to avoid? Well they do, and it’s good advice — keep looking at that tree and your subconscious will steer you right into it. Works for driving, too.

I’m not sure if it’s the same psychological phenomenon, but this is what I was reminded of when reading a post by Chris at Mixing Memory about some puzzling psychology experiments. Apparently, just being exposed to words expressing the concept of rudeness is enough to make people behave more rudely.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows set out to demonstrate the existence of “automatic social behavior.” They conducted three experiments, each targeting different behaviors. In the first experiment, they first gave participants a scrambled sentence test, which involves presenting five scrambled words and asking the participant to form a grammatically correct sentence out of four of them as quickly as possible. They developed three different lists of scrambled words, one of which primed the concept RUDE, another that primed POLITE, and a third that was neutral with respect to rudeness/politeness. The primes in these lists included adjectives, adverbs, or verbs that were associated with the concepts (e.g., brazen, aggressively, or disturb for RUDE, and considerate, patiently, and respect for POLITE). While the participant was completing the scrambled sentence test, the experimenter left and began talking to a confederate (an experimenter posing as another participant). When the participant finished, he or she came out of the room to look for the experimenter to receive instructions for the next task (as the experimenter had instructed). However, the participant always found the experimenter talking to the confederate. Bargh et al. then measured the time it took for the participant to interrupt the conversation between the experimenter and the confederate.

Guess what they found. Of the participants who did the RUDE version of the sentence test, more than 60% interrupted in under ten minutes (they cut it off at ten minutes — can you imagine how frustrated some of those participants were after standing there for ten minutes?), whereas fewer than 20% of the POLITE-primed participants interrupted in that time. The neutral list participants were in between at around 40%. The RUDE participants also interrupted a full 3 minutes sooner than neutral participants, and almost 4 minutes sooner than the POLITE participants.

As Chris says, it gets weirder. My favorite was how people move more slowly after reading words associated with older people. So how do you think our personalities are affected by reading too many blogs?