It's hard to tell whether the psychological studies on "priming" are more inspiring or scary. Over and over, researchers show that one person can alter another's behavior by planting suggestions. The subjects don't know the suggestions affected them; in fact, they don't know they were affected at all.
Malcolm Gladwell collects some striking examples in his book Blink:
- In one experiment, Yale's John Bargh gave subjects seemingly random word puzzles, with no apparent point or thread. Some of the puzzles containing a subtle preponderence of "old" words: Florida, gray, wrinkle, lonely, bingo. Walking down the hallway to leave after the exercise, the subjects who had the "old" words walked more slowly.
- The same paper describes an experiment in which, when they finished the word puzzles, subjects were asked to find "the experimenter" to get their next task. The experimenter was always involved in an interminable conversation with someone else. Subjects whose word puzzles had scattered words invoking rudeness -- bold, rude, bother, disturb, intrude -- had no trouble interrupting. But a huge majority of subjects whose puzzles were full of "polite" words -- respect, considerate, appreciate, patiently, courteous -- never interrupted the experimenter's conversation at all.
- Dutch researchers asked some subjects told to think in detail about becoming a professor, and others to think about soccer hooligans. In subsequent tests with Trivial Pursuit questions, the ones who imagined professorships got significantly more questions right.
- In another study, Professors Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson gave questions from the GRE exam to black college students. All the students filled out pretest questionnaires, identical except that some questionnaires required the students to identify their race and some did not. The students who had to say they were black got half as many questions right on the test as those who did not. (The links to both of the last two studies are to abstracts, but if you search the titles, you can find them attached to university course syllabi.)
Priming with questions
A study released last week expands the research on the priming power of another seemingly innocuous tool: the simple question. Researchers Gavin Fitzsimons, Joseph Nunes, and Patti Williams already knew that questions have power. Prior studies have shown that if you ask people about something they feel positively about, they'll do more of it, and if you ask them about something they feel negatively about, they'll do less of it.
But what, the researchers wondered, about the things we feel ambivalent about? Take vice. We know it's bad, but we also think it's fun. Would questioning "prime" vice, and if so which way?
Ask about vice, and you get vice
The wrong way, in this study. It turns out that when college students were asked how often they thought they might skip class, they skipped more. How often will you drink or watch TV instead of studying? Whatever the answer, those who heard the question drank and watched TV more, and studied less.
The researchers acknowledged that the phrasing of the question may have been more important than the fact of it:
[W]e ask[ed] how likely respondents are to engage in the vice behavior, in effect framing the vice behavior as something that will be done . . . . Perhaps another way of framing the question (e.g., How likely are you to avoid the behavior?) might make the negative component of the attitude more accessible and thus be more likely to drive behavior.
Priming at trial
Does any of this matter at trial? It might matter a lot. You have two chances to ask your jurors questions: voir dire, for direct questions, and closing argument, for rhetorical ones. If you want to give a holdout the strength to stand firm, or you need the jurors to compare the patent claims one by one to your client's product, it can't hurt to help them picture themselves doing that, and to ask them whether they can.
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Source note:
The "questions" paper is "License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations," in the upcoming Journal of Consumer Research. The press release is here and the full paper is here.
(Photo by Karen Stannard at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ridinfast/257994376/; license details there.)
