You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself Read Online Free

available inside the box of mutually beneficial primes, no reason to leave, whether to sleep, eat, or anything else—no external priming allowed.
    Coca-Cola stumbled onto the power Santa Claus has to prime you during the holidays. Thoughts of childhood happiness and wholesome family values appear in your subconscious as you choose between Coke or a generic brand of soda. Grocery stores noticed an increase in sales when the smell of freshly baked bread primed people to buy more food. Adding the words “all natural” or including pictures of pastoral farms and crops primes you with thoughts of nature, dissuading thoughts of factories and chemical preservatives. Cable channels and large corporations prime potential audiences by adopting an image, a brand, so as to meet you halfway before you decide how to engage and judge them. Production companies spend millions of dollars to create trailers and movie posters to form first impressions so you are primed to enjoy their films in a certain way right up until the opening titles. Restaurants decorate their interiors to communicate everything from fine dining to psychedelic hippie communes in order to prime you to enjoy their cheese sticks. From every corner of the modern world advertisers are launching attacks on your unconscious in an attempt to prime your behavior to be more favorable for the bottom lines of their clients.
    Businesses discovered priming before psychologists did, but once psychology started digging into the mind, more and more examples of automaticity were uncovered, and even today it isn’t clear how much of your behavior is under your conscious control.
    The question of who is truly in the driver’s seat was made far more complex in 1996 by a series of studies published by John Bargh in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .
    He had New York University students unscramble thirty separate five-word sentences. He told them he was interested in their language abilities, but he was really studying priming. He assembled three groups. One unscrambled sentences with terms associated with aggression and rudeness such as “brazen,” “disturb,” and “bluntly.” Another group unscrambled words from a bank of polite terms like “courteous” and “behaved.” A third group served as a control with words like “gleefully,” “prepares,” and “exercising.”
    The experimenters told the students how to complete the task and once they were done to come find them to receive the second assignment, but this was the real experiment. When each student approached the researcher he or she found him already engaged in a conversation with an actor who was pretending to be having trouble understanding the word puzzles. The researcher completely ignored the student until he or she interrupted the conversation or ten minutes passed.
    The results? The polite-word group waited on average 9.3 minutes to interrupt; the neutral group waited about 8.7 minutes; and the rude-word group waited around 5.4 minutes. To the researchers’ surprise, more than 80 percent of the polite-word group waited the full 10 minutes. Only 35 percent of the rude-word group chose not to intrude. The subjects were interviewed after the experiment and couldn’t pinpoint why they chose to wait or to interrupt. The question never entered their minds because as far as they knew, their behavior had not been influenced. The scrambled sentences, they believed, had not affected them.
    In a second experiment, Bargh had participants unscramble sentences that contained words associated with old age, like “retired,” “wrinkled,” and “bingo.” He then clocked participants’ speed as they walked down a hall to an elevator and compared it to the speed they walked when they first strolled in. They took about one to two extra seconds to reach their destination. Just as with the rude-word groups, the old-word groups were primed by the ideas and associations the words created. To be sure this