Priming

Definition

Priming is the process by which perception (or experience) of an item (or person or event) leads to an increase in its accessibility and the accessibility of related material and behaviors. Priming is a phenomenon that is enormously influential in people's everyday lives, yet people are typically unaware of its operation and impact. For example, if you pass a telephone and it reminds you to call your mother, priming is at work. If middle-aged women make you feel nervous after watching Desperate Housewives, once again priming can be blamed. Priming is particularly important in social psychology because of the inherent complexity of social information processing—when many interpretations and behavioral options are available, the accessibility determined by priming can constrain perception, cognition, and action.

How Does Priming Work?

Psychologists' understanding of priming is based on the idea that information is stored in units (schemas) in long-term memory, whose activation levels can be increased or decreased. When the activation of a schema is increased, it becomes more accessible—that is, more likely to enter consciousness or direct behavior. Priming research has capitalized on the connectionist idea that when schemas are frequently activated together, connections form between them, thereby creating networks in the mind. Activation can spread through these networks such that following activation of one schema, the activation of associated schemas in the network is also increased. This is a [Page 700]very useful tool because it helps prepare the mind for what it is likely to encounter next, or may have to think about very soon. When a cat is perceived, for instance, the “cat” schema will be activated, and activation will spread to cat-related concepts such as “cat's meow” and “cat's scratch.” This activation means that potentially important information is then more accessible, enabling people to behave toward the cat in an appropriate manner.

Empirically, this priming process would not be investigated by watching a perceiver's behavior toward the cat, but by testing the accessibility of the relevant schema using techniques such as word recognition or lexical decision tasks. For example, research has shown that reading the word bread will prime associated items such as butter, but not unrelated items such as bikini. Experiments of this kind confirm that priming does indeed increase the activation of associated schemas.

Types of Priming