GUT FEELINGS

Hand Pump, Internet Domain

Now that another voting season has rolled around for the now infamous year 2020, it would be time once again to remind folks of the priming effect—priming your brain like a pump.  It’s been said that if it’s happening in Washington during a major election year, its political!  Unbeknownst to our explicit conscious awareness, our brains can be subtly manipulated to change our behavior.  The term subliminal advertising comes to mind where a word may be quickly flashed on a screen so fast that your conscious explicit memory doesn’t even notice it, but your implicit memory locks it in the vault.  I remember a study years ago where the word Coke was flashed repeatedly on a movie screen and Coke sales increased during the subsequent intermission.  David Eagleman in his book Incognito calls this the “mere exposure effect which illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world”.  And we generally don’t even know what’s stored deep within our unconscious.

Eagleman notes that merely exposing our implicit memory multiple times to a product brand, celebrity, movement or political ad will entice us to prefer it more.  Even bad press is considered better than no press, especially if “they spell my name right”!  The “illusion of truth” effect is especially troubling because we are more likely to believe something if we hear it repeatedly whether or not it is true.  We’ve all witnessed this effect lately during protests and political inquiries!  Fact checking can’t happen enough during this election year if we want to hold folks accountable.

And when we have a “hunch” or a “gut feeling” about something, our implicit memory is tickling our consciousness to make the right choice.