subjects to arrange words into sentences. For the control group, the words given to them were random and neutral—to not suggest any specific ideas. The test group was given words such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, and wrinkly—all words that we might associate with the elderly. That’s the first part of the study—priming subjects with words that might suggest old age. The second part of the study was where things got interesting. After they finished arranging the words, the subjects were sent to do another experiment in an office down the hall. Of course, this short walk was the real experiment—researchers were timing their walk. The results? “Participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants.” Apparently, unconscious thinking about old age influenced physical actions. When subjects were questioned afterward, none of them recalled noticing a theme in the words they arranged, and they insisted that nothing in that first experiment could have influenced their stride. And yet ...
Focus on the conceptual associations.
This connection between the mind and body—that what we think and do are linked—is a fascinating one, that seems to work both ways. When we explored the mind-body connection in Chapter 2, we mentioned the “warm cup” study, one of several studies exploring links between physiological and affective associations. Similar studies seem to suggest this same correlation between bodily states and concepts brought to mind. Perhaps you’ve heard that placing a pencil in your mouth for three minutes leads to a happier state? The idea here being that forcing your mouth into a smile actually triggers the associated feelings of happiness and can actually “hack” your brains to be happier. Or maybe you’ve seen the TED talk about “power poses,” that reclining in a chair, and putting your hands behind your head before an interview can lead to more confidence.12 On a purely anecdotal note, I (Stephen) have found chewing gum just before an important social event (client pitch, social conversation) leads to increased feelings of confidence and helps counter my introverted tendencies. While the science of this mind-body connection is still emerging (and tenuous, at times!), the connection is well-acknowledged by a number of professions that focus on the body, from yoga, theater, and dance instruction to the sports coach who has the athletic team practicing visualization techniques.
CAUTION: PRIMING STUDIES HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE
While anecdotes and studies on the mind-body connection are numerous, they should be taken with a bit of skepticism. Attempts to replicate research studies have met with mixed results, which leads us to avoid making any hard assertions about the scientific validity of priming. That said, what is suggested by these studies is consistent with the bigger idea of what we’re asserting: all thought is associative, and these associations are widespread, throughout the body, brain and environment. Whether the trigger is language, a picture, posture, or some other stimulus, and whether the resulting action is a change in thought or motion, it’s all— from our perspective—associative, pattern matching.
We’d venture to say few of us have trouble with the concept of priming. Indeed, the “power of suggestion” is a popular idea for most of the population. However, of the many strands of research into human behavior, priming is one strand that has been fiercely criticized and should not be taken as fact. For a different take on priming and the Florida Effect, we recommend reading “Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?”13
Anchoring
Whereas priming suggests a concept that somehow correlates with present or future concepts, anchoring need not exhibit such a correlation. With anchoring, introducing an irrelevant number biases your judgment. Adding a completely arbitrary factor—say the last two digits of your Social Security number—affects an unrelated piece of information, say the estimated value of a bottle of wine or a trackball mouse. In fact, this is precisely what Professor Dan Ariely and others did in a classroom experiment.14
After being shown an array of objects—wines of different values, computer equipment, books, boxes of chocolate—students were asked to do several things.
• First, translate the last two digits of their Social Security numbers into a dollar amount. For example, if the last two digits of your SSN were 37, then you would write this as a dollar amount: $37.
• Next, students wrote this dollar amount next to each object, and were asked if they would pay this amount for each object. Yes or no. Students were reminded that this was a completely arbitrary number and should have no correlation with the actual price value of the object.
• Finally, students were asked to write the maximum amount they would be willing to pay for each object.
Here is where things got interesting. The assessed value of these objects showed a strong correlation with the last two digits of the students’ SSNs. Students with Social Security numbers in the lowest 20%, priced (on average) a bottle of ’98 Côtes du Rhône wine at U.S. $8.64; students on the other end of the bell curve, the 20% with the highest Social Security numbers priced (on average) the same bottle at U.S. $27.91.
While completely arbitrary, the number written down appears to influence, or “anchor,” the value attribution. This is the basic idea of price anchoring, that when asked to make a numerical estimate where we have little information to go on, we’re often biased by some initial starting number. This happens in everything from auctions to retail price settings. If a retailer prices an object at a high dollar amount, then any discount off that amount will seem to be a good deal. Conversely, this same fixed amount might seem like too much, if the initial anchor were set much lower.
In his book Predictably Irrational, Ariely comments on this price anchoring research, stating:
Social Security numbers were the anchor in this experiment only because we requested them. We could have just as well asked for the current temperature or the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Any question, in fact, would have created the anchor. Does that seem rational? Of course not.
While we’re focused here on one popular study, anchoring is a well-studied phenomenon, with research going back to at least the 1950s by researchers such as Muzafer Sherif.
On their own, these studies were remarkable. In the context of this chapter, though, anchoring should be less remarkable: it’s simply an association. By suggesting a detail—even a detail that may have little or nothing to do with the subject—we introduce extra information into our conscious (or unconscious) mind. This detail becomes part of the web of related associations that our brain has to sort out, in a never-ending job as a perceptual organ. The brain doesn’t necessarily care that information is unrelated—it’s all information to reconcile into a sensible pattern, if there is one. In economic terms, we might describe this as arbitrary coherence, where the brain attempts to maintain a decision consistent with previous decisions (coherence), even if the initial decision was arbitrary.
While the majority of studies investigate anchoring with numeric values, there are exceptions, studies that explore other—non-numeric—forms of anchoring. In a study of “cross-modality” anchoring, researchers wanted to push the boundary conditions for anchoring, to assess at what point a piece of irrelevant information would no longer influence an individual’s judgments.
With this study, students were given a survey with a series of unrelated questions, one per page. Among the decoy questions was an activity that required students to draw a series of either short or long lines. Later, one of the questions would ask students an estimation question, such as the length of the Mississippi River or the average temperature in Honolulu in July. The results? Researchers found a strong correlation between being primed with drawing long
