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.