august 2026
Our brains are fundamentally lazy. We process most information through our instinctual, unconscious brain. Because of this, we are susceptible to the idea of priming, where subtle words can evoke great effects on our behavior.
We cannot know this from experience, but we have to accept the alien idea that our behavior is primed by events we could never be aware of.
In a classic experiment, psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at NYU to assemble four-word sentences from sets of five words. One group of students was given words associated with the elderly, like Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed the task, the young participants were sent to an office down the hall. Unknown to them, the short walk was what the experiment was really about. The researchers measured the time it took people to get from one end of the hallway to the other. Bargh found that the young people who had fashioned sentences from the elderly-themed words walked down the hallway significantly slower than the others — a result now known as the “Florida effect” [1] (also one of my favorite studies).
None of this was conscious, and the participants were wholly unaware of the true nature of the experiment. But their behavior was affected.
In other instances, our perception of what is good or bad can be influenced simply by repetition. In 1969, the famous Robert Zajonc conducted an experiment at the University of Michigan and Michigan State. In the student newspapers, Turkish words — kadirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, and iktitaf — were printed in an ad-like box on the front page. How often each word appeared varied: one, two, five, ten, or twenty-five times. At the end of a couple of weeks, questionnaires were sent to the university communities asking whether each word “means something good” or “means something bad.”
The results were incredible. The words repeated most frequently were rated far more favorably than the words that appeared once or twice. Zajonc found that arbitrary repetition can cause us to like certain ideas without even knowing why — otherwise known as the mere exposure effect [2].
How we act and what we like can be influenced through subconscious means. So every way of consuming information has an effect on our character. The question is which of them are healthy for us.
Social media acts as a Pandora’s box of data that has no need for a grounding in truth. Influencers can say whatever they wish with almost no consequence.
While it is easy to reject statements that are outright lies or misinformation, the world’s ideas often don’t fall into two black-and-white categories of truth and falsehood. A majority of ideas fall in the gray zone in between.
Thus, we cannot truly tell which streams of information are influencing us in a good or bad way. Unlike a book picked up from a library, whose author’s biases and origins of ideas we can easily determine, social media presents hundreds of posts, reels, and stories that overwhelm our normal means of fending off partiality.
It is always good to learn, but what we see on a daily basis has an unprecedented effect on our behavior and viewpoints. It’s best to control how we receive information in an orderly manner.
credit to Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the amazing book that presented both studies.
[1] Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230
[2] Zajonc, R. B., & Rajecki, D. W. (1969). Exposure and affect: A field experiment. Psychonomic Science, 17, 216–217. doi.org/10.3758/BF03329178