Priming
Still reading 'The Circle Maker', and once again I am compelled to share. In the book, Batterson speaks of 'priming'. He tells of a study conducted at New York University. They gave two groups scrambled sentence tests. The first group had sentences containing positive words like respect, considerate, and yield. The second group had sentences containing rude words like disturb, bother, and intrude. After the test, they sent each person, one at a time, to go into the hallway and speak to the person running the experiment about their assignment. An actor was placed to be engaged in active conversation with the experimenter when the student arrived. They were looking to see how long it would ale the student to interrupt. Amazingly, the group who had read the rude words interrupted, on average, after 5 minutes of waiting. The other group, primed with polite words, had 82% of the participants never interrupt at all. The point was made that our attitudes and behavi