PSYC 241 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: John Bargh, Availability Heuristic, Elizabeth Loftus
15 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Our preconceptions guide how we perceive and interpret info. We fail to realize how great this effect is. The overarching point: we respond not to reality as it is but to reality as we construe it. Priming is the awakening or activating of certain associations. Priming experiments reveal how one thought, even awareness, can influence another thought, or even action. John bargh (1996) asked people to complete sentences containing worlds such as old, wise and retired. Shortly after, they observed these people walking more slowly to the elevator than did those not primed with aging-related words. Moreover, the slow walkers had no awareness of their walking speed or having just viewed words that primed aging. Often our thinking and acting are primed by events of which we are unaware. Watching a scary movie alone at home can prime our thinking, by activating emotions that, w/o our realizing it, cause us to interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder.
