Science News - May 19, 2012

before and after subliminal presentations of words related to speed or slowness.

During subliminal priming, letter and number strings flashed on the screen just long enough to be noticed. Some volunteers were told that these strings would distract them from any thoughts starting to form. Among these individuals, average reading pace quickened in response to fast primes and decelerated after slow primes. Loersch suggests that participants mistook prime-induced urges to speed up or slow down for their own ideas, believing their thoughts were powerful enough to survive experimental distractions. Taking ownership of primed thoughts prompted behavior consistent with those thoughts — reading instructions either faster or slower.

Reading rates remained unchanged, though, when participants were told that letter and number strings contained powerful, irresistible subliminal messages. In this case, volunteers may have refused to heed urges to speed up or slow down, feeling that those urges were alien notions implanted during the trial. “We may be priming people to trust or distrust what they remember,” Loersch says.

Some real-life situations up the chances of mistaking externally influenced thoughts for self-generated ones, he adds. Priming may flourish, for example, when people have to make quick decisions in complex settings.

Doyen takes a dim view of subliminal research. “It’s already difficult to obtain priming effects with weakly perceived cues in scrambled sentences,” he says. “I doubt subliminal priming effects will stand up to replication.”

Repeats and defeats

attempts to replicate studies of unconscious influences on mind and behavior often don’t get published. Some researchers say that publicizing details on such research repeats (some below) would allow a fuller evaluation of priming.

initially, a report suggested that U.S. volunteers (who are known to talk about time as if it moves horizontally, as in “moving forward”) make faster judgments about factual questions after seeing an array of horizontal objects rather than a vertical array. a do-over didn’t find the effect.

a 2008 study found that volunteers scored lower on a general knowledge test if, after being prompted to feel close to others, the volunteers focused on the hair color of blond beauty queens. a redo got the same result, suggesting that identifying with “dumb blondes” can undermine thinking—at least among those who buy into the stereotype.

compared with students who plotted closely situated points on a grid, students who plotted distant points reported weaker emotional ties to family members in one study. a replication attempt that minimized researchers’ contacts with participants found that the distance between points didn’t drive feelings toward kin.

in an original study, researchers reported that europeans’ scores on a general knowledge test rose after thinking about college professors and dropped after thinking about soccer hooligans. in a replication, test scores remained stable after participants’ contemplated either academics or sports ruffians.

× × ×

Warm showers for cold hearts Whether Doyen and others buy into priming’s effects or not, Bargh is poised to move the dispute outside the lab.

Bargh suspects that physical warmth and other health-related cues, delivered by image or text to smartphones or via virtual reality headsets, can supplement treatments for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addictive behaviors and learning disabilities.

Lonely, rejected guys and gals instinc-
tively seek out physical warmth without
realizing what they’re doing, Bargh and
psychologist Idit Shalev of Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev in Beersheba,
Israel, reported in the February Emotion.