Social Priming: In Theory

You are walking into a room. There is a man sitting behind a table. You sit down across from him. The man sits higher than you, which makes you feel relatively powerless. But he gives you a mug of hot coffee. The warm mug makes you like the man a little more. You warm to him so to speak. He asks you about your relationship with your significant other. You lean on the table. It is wobbly, so you say that your relationship is very stable. You take a sip from the coffee. It is bitter. Now you think the man is a jerk for having asked you about your personal life. Then the man hands you the test. It is attached to a heavy clipboard, which makes you think the test is important. You’re probably not going to do well, because the cover sheet is red. But wait—what a relief!—on the first page is a picture of Einstein! Now you are going to ace the test. If only there wasn’t that lingering smell of the cleaning fluid that was used to sanitize the room. It makes you want to clean the crumbs, which must have been left by a previous test-taker, from the tabletop. You need to focus. Fortunately, there is a ray of sunlight coming through the window. It leaves a bright spot on the floor. At last you can concentrate on the test. The final question of the test asks you to form a sentence that includes the words gray, Florida, bingo, and pension. You leave the room, walking slowly…

These are just some findings that have been reported in the literature (well, most of them are; I made one up, guess which one) on social priming. But I don’t want to focus on the findings themselves in this post. What I want to do is find out what the theory behind them is. The picture suggested by social priming research is that we are constantly bombarded with a cacophony of cues in all sensory domains that push our behavior around in various ways. This cannot be true.

In a 2006 paper, John Bargh, by all accounts the major player in the area of social priming, arrived at very much the same conclusion. What have we been priming all these years?, he asks. To address the cacophony problem, Bargh suggests that all cues are not created equal. Cues related to goals trump other cues. For example (this is my example, not his), you may be walking slowly out of the room after having just formed a sentence that includes gray, Florida, bingo, and pension but as soon as someone yells FIRE!, you are bound to make a dash for the nearest exit. Your self-preservation goal has trumped whatever priming you may have received from the sentence-unscrambling task.

This makes sense. Bargh also provides a useful overview of the history of priming. Although priming is a concept from cognitive psychology, Bargh is right in criticizing classical cognitive science in its treatment of priming. Classical cognitive science has mostly been interested in priming words. For example, you recognize the word doctor faster after having just seen nurse than after having just seen bread.  Although this has provided useful insights into the organization of memory, inference generation, false memories, speech errors, and so on, there is no clear behavioral component. The behavior on the subject’s part is limited to pressing a button. Bargh does not think this counts as real behavior. And who can blame him? His goal is to examine how priming affects not just thinking but also action, a goal that has also been adopted in contemporary cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Bargh observes another difference between classical cognitive psychology and social cognition. The classical priming experiment examines words as primes and as targets (the recognition of a word is often the dependent measure). In social cognition complex conceptual structures are primed that have action components associated with them. Whereas a classical priming experiment may want to investigate whether gray primes old, a social priming experiment wants to know whether priming with gray and old will influence the speed of subsequent action. Despite its strong points, the Bargh article is rather low on specifics regarding the mechanisms of priming and the representations that are involved.

Enter a recent Psychological Review paper by Stroeber and Thagard. They provide a computational model of social priming. A key concept in their model is constraint satisfaction. To illustrate this, let me introduce you to your long-lost cousin Lars from Sweden. He used to live on a small island in the middle of a lake that is frozen over much of the year. His close relatives live in villages all around the lake. Did I tell you he died? How sad, you just learned you had a lost relative and now you find out he’s already dead. Among Lars’ possessions was a very expensive grand piano, which is coveted by all of his relatives. They’ve put the piano on the ice and are now each trying to push the valuable musical instrument to their side of the lake. Björn and Bennie are very interested in the piano but being musicians, they are not very strong and they cannot get the piano to move in their preferred direction (if only they had Agneta and Frida to help them!). Their cousin Knut is a hockey player and is pushing the piano in a different direction. Other relatives are pushing in yet other directions. Which way will the piano go? It is basically the sum of all the force vectors. Because people will not be able to apply constant force, the piano’s path will not be a straight line—until the weakest relatives get tired. And then, slowly but surely, the piano will move in the direction of Knut’s log cabin.

That’s how constraint satisfaction works. Each relative constrains the path of the piano just like each cue constrains the course of action. Some cues will be stronger than others. And some cues will have longer-lasting effects than others. The system handles the cacophony of cues through constraint satisfaction. Sometimes a cue is so strong that it wins out immediately over all the others, as in the case when someone yells FIRE!. The cousin-Lars-analogy of this would be if someone donned an Iron Man suit and then started pushing the piano. The others might as well give up right away.

In line with Bargh’s notion of priming, the model assumes that primed concepts activate holistic representations of situations, which have psychological, cultural, and biological components. These layers mutually constrain each other. The way in which they do this is acquired during socialization. Because concepts have affective meanings, they can generate responses automatically. Affective meanings are organized in culturally-shared structures (meaning that responses will be similar across individuals). Members of a culture will try to maintain these structures, which produces a set of constraints.

So how does this cause behavior? Priming activates neural populations that act as “semantic pointers” to underlying sensorimotor and emotional representations. This is the biological component of the model. The idea is very much in the vein of Damasio’s convergence zones.

So the model is an account of how a simple prime in one modality may give rise to a range of responses, some purely cognitive, some emotional, and some behavioral.

I realize that I’m not doing the model much justice in this brief description but my point is that it apparently is possible to come up with a plausible model of social priming that is relatively detailed in parts and is consistent with current models of memory and action.

It is of course ironic that the model has been developed to explain findings that have proven so difficult to replicate and have raised so much controversy. Nevertheless, the model provides an interesting and rather detailed account of how social priming works in theory. Now it would be interesting to see if it can generate novel predictions that can be tested in rigorous experiments.