Nudge, Sunstein And Thaler: Article Analysis

In the third chapter of Nudge, Sunstein and Thaler elaborate on a psychological phenomenon known as priming. Priming is defined as any action that provides subtle influences that can increase the ease with which certain information comes to mind or elicits an action. Believe it or not, priming is a big factor in our everyday lives. For example, let’s say you are shopping for the latest Apple product at the Apple Store, but you noticed that the line at the cash-register was excessively long, so you decide to shop elsewhere for this product. However, right when you start to walk out the door, a sales associate stops you and tells you that there are only five left of the product you are looking for at the current price. This simple, seemingly banal statement is, in fact, a prime (no pun intended) example of priming. By simply imposing the general disposition of scarcity on a customer, a salesman can sway your inclinations. Furthermore, in a study called that “walk-like-an-old-person experiment”, participants were handed slips of paper with words associated with elderly people (Bingo, Florida, Art. etc.) or names with no

After giving the participants the words, the experimenters timed how long each participant took to walk down a hallway. Interestingly enough, the experimenters found that the participants given words associated with the elderly took half a second longer to walker down the hallway than those who were given normal words. Perhaps, one of the more obscure manifestations of priming in everyday life was uncovered in a study conducted by Yale University’s Psychology Department, where a possible relationship between the temperature of a cup of Coffee and friendliness was observed. The study, which was conducted in Yale’s Psychology building, consisted of a volunteer riding up an elevator with one of the experimenters, who suddenly asks if the volunteer could hold his/her cup of coffee for a few seconds while he/she jots down a note. The