[Billy73]

One of the most fascinating, and to me unnerving, results to come out of a lot of recent psychological research is just how much of our behavior is subject to unconscious influence. I for one and I think most people like to believe we are acting deliberately when in fact we often are not. This article will focus on a phenomenon referred to in research as priming.

Consider the following sometimes very large effects:
Subjects exposed to words about elderly people walked more slowly and amazingly had worse recall (!) of the experiment than the control subjects.
Subject exposed to words related to rudeness were much more likely to interrupt a discussion than those exposed to words related to politeness.
Subjects primed with Albert Einstein performed better on trivia tests than those primed with Claudia Schiffer, but performed worse on general knowledge tests. This is known as the contrast effect.
People exposed to stories about moral indiscretion are twice as likely to choose cleaning products as gifts as those exposed to stories of moral virtue. Its seems they feel the need to “clean up”.
Subjects holding a cold drink rated others’ personalities much colder than subjects holding a warm drink.
Students exposed to a faint odor of a cleaning product are 3 times more likely to clean up after eating a snack than those not exposed.
African American students primed with racial stereotypes will perform worse on intellectual tests than those primed with examples of black achievement.
Subjects given a word puzzle containing words like “strive”, “succeed”, “achieve”, etc., are more than twice as likely to continue working on other puzzles past the time they are instructed to stop.
Reading stories about people seeking sex will make you much more likely to help attractive people.
Reading stories about money making will actually improve your performance on tasks where you can earn money.
People invested much more conservatively in a room with a briefcase than in a room with a backpack.
You will eat a lot more week old crappy tasting popcorn in a big container than you will eat fresh popcorn from a smaller container, even though both of them are too large for you to finish.
People primed with arbitrary numbers will anchor on that number when making subsequent decisions. For example being primed with a low number will cause subjects to be willing to pay much less for an item than those primed with higher numbers.
People ate 69% more jelly beans when all the colors were mixed together than when they were separated by colors. Along the same lines, presenting 10 colors of M&Ms instead of 7, increased consumption 43%.

[Billy73]

Wenn ich nicht so dumm und faul wäre würde ich mit dem Wissen auf der Insel Somos eine Epikureer-Sekte aufmachen. ;-)