How
susceptible are you to suggestion? Not very?
Well maybe, but would you know? There has been an idea floating around
the Social Psychology field for the past fifteen years that we can be quite
unconsciously influenced by noticing the
right words.
The
original experiment that purported to show this was organized so that a group
of people were given a word game where they were spotting the odd word out.
With some of these, the out of place word could be associated with being
elderly. The control group had neutral words. After the experiment the
participants walking speed was measured. The elderly primed group walked more
slowly as though they were thinking “I’m old.”
Now, Doyen
et al have repeated the experiment in
a rather more controlled fashion with a group of 120 students from Bruxelles
(1). Their walking speed was measured using infrared beams and a computer and,
lo and behold, the students walked along at their normal pace, quite oblivious
of any association with the elderly words that they’d been exposed to.
Well, of
course, other experiments followed. The next experiment with a fresh batch of
students had half the experimenters who were monitoring the human lab rats told
that the expected result was that the walk would be speeded up and the other
half that it would be slower. They were given stopwatches and were told the
electronic kit was unreliable so they needed to measure the speeds themselves.
The
experimenter’s prejudices were confirmed with the stopwatch results. But now
comes the fly in the ointment. When the speeds measured by the electronics were
checked, the rate was indeed slower for the data involving the experimenters
that expected it to be slow, but not so with the speedy group – they had not
speeded up.
So we seem
to be left with a complex interaction from any priming from the actual task and
the expectations of the guys running the experiment. Seems the unbiased
observer is hard to find and we seem to be able to communicate what we expect
without saying a word, and that can be effective if something else catches your
attention.
I’m left
wondering whose doing my thinking for me.
