A badge, a preview, a name on a screen. Does a small cue really change what you do next? The honest answer has three parts: a famous claim, a failure to repeat it, and a smaller truth that is left.
What priming is
Priming is the idea that something you see or read can change what you think or do a moment later, without your noticing. Seeing the word “doctor” makes “nurse” easier to recognise: that kind of priming is solid. The controversial kind is the claim that a cue can change your behaviour.
The famous study
In 1996, Bargh, Chen and Burrows reported that people who had unscrambled sentences containing words linked to old age then walked more slowly down a corridor than people who had not. The result was cited for decades as proof that hidden cues steer us.
The failure to repeat it
In 2012, Doyen and colleagues tried to repeat the study, timing the walk with infrared sensors rather than a person with a stopwatch. They did not find the effect, except when the experimenters had been told to expect slow walking. Many other social priming results have since been hard to repeat, and the field became a leading example of the replication crisis in psychology.
What is left
Psychological Bulletin, 2016
Weingarten et al.: a meta-analysis of incidental priming
The authors pooled 133 studies in which a cue was shown and behaviour was measured afterwards. The average effect was small (d ≈ 0.35). In plain terms, a typical person who saw the cue scored higher than roughly 64 out of 100 people who did not.
The catch: A small effect, in a field where many individual results have not held up. Treat any single priming claim with suspicion.
Why a phone makes it matter
We are not claiming your phone primes you the way a lab does. The safer claim is this. Cues move behaviour a little. A phone produces a great many of them: red badges, previews, “someone is typing”, autoplay. They are built to pull you toward an action, and a small nudge repeated all day is not small.
Two things to try
- Turn off badges and previews for every app that is not a person you care about.
- Put the apps you reach for most on a screen with no other icons, or block them for a while.
References
- 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.
- Doyen, S., et al. (2012). Behavioral priming: It’s all in the mind, but whose mind? PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081.
- Weingarten, E., et al. (2016). From primed concepts to action: A meta-analysis of the behavioral effects of incidental priming. Psychological Bulletin, 142(5), 472–497.