The presentation of some stimulus affects how someone perceives/reacts to the presentation of a following one because the first one was similar in some way to the latter (one does not need to remember the previous or be conscious of its affects for there to be an affect).

Repetition Priming 

Information shown in the beginning of something has a greater affect than information revealed later. Embodied by the quote "put your best foot forward."

The Primacy Effect

Priming has been used in the realms of psychology as a way to alter people's behaviors or performance. It can be overt (supraliminal) or covert (subliminal). A subsequent behavior, which is a result of the priming, occurs typically without conscious awareness. In the field of microtask crowdsourcing, multiple types of primes have been used to increase and alter people's performance.

Priming to Increase Performance in Microtask Crowdsourcing

Participants were given a headline that did not relate to COVID-19, and they were asked to rate its accuracy. The prompt was essentially priming the participants with the concept of accuracy.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Evaluation Prompt

When people consider a value and then have to estimate an unknown quantity. The estimated number will stay close to original number considered, whether or not the original number is related to the unknown quantity. There is debate on whether the effect is an adjustment heuristic (Tversky), an example of priming (Kahneman), or both.

Anchoring

The common association between 'peanut butter' and 'jelly' serves as an example of priming. When an individual is prompted with the term 'peanut butter,' the concept of 'jelly' is primed and becomes more easily retrievable. This occurs because of the strong, frequently reinforced link between these two concepts within a person's semantic network.

Peanut Butter and Jelly as an Example of Priming

Nodes are activated when nodes with links to them (or close to them) are activated. The nearby nodes are primed to be retrieved by memory more easily.

Spreading Activation

When a sensory experience (hearing a word/phrase, or seeing a picture), triggers an associational response that effects your decision making afterwards. The presentation of some stimuli affects someones response to the presentation of a following one.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

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- Priming effect (and anchoring)

- Halo effect

- Sampling effect

- Availability heuristic

- Representative heuristic

Effects that arise from system 1 activity

- Context dependance of self-categories (social vs. personal identification)
- Priming effect
- Intuitive understanding of sampling effects (especially among statisticians)
- state-dependent learning

Psychological appearances of domain specificity

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Nota, 2013.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Goldstein, E. B. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Nelson Education.


Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020, April 22). Psychology (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

OpenStax Psychology (2nd ed.) Textbook

Even statistical experts do not recognize if a sampling effects played a large role in an outcome, when using their intuition.

Intuitive understanding of sampling effects

Priming effect

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where individuals make decisions based on information that is most easily recalled, such as a recent experience or a vivid example. This reliance on readily available information can lead to flawed judgments, as the most accessible information is not always the most representative or accurate for making a sound decision.

Availability Heuristic

The Halo Effect is a cognitive bias where an individual's overall impression of a person influences subsequent judgments about their specific character traits. For example, a generally positive perception can lead to the assumption that the person also possesses other desirable qualities, such as good morals or intelligence, without any direct evidence.

Halo Effect

Self categories are not fixed - individuals can toggle through self-categories based on their needs and relevance to a present situation.  Self-categories are flexible as to allow the individual to adapt to the social context.

Context dependance of self-categories

Kahneman and Tversky in 1971, conducted a study to assess the intuitive understanding of sampling affects among statisticians. After asking the statisticians:
- There are two hospitals, one large and one small. 60% of the babies born in one of the hospitals on a specific day happened to be a boy. Which hospital was it likely to be?

During a causal conversation, most statisticians answered wrong and chose the large hospital. This is despite the fact a basic idea in statistics is that small sample sizes are likely to be variable. The context the idea was expressed in caused errors among "experts" in the discipline.

Domain specificity and intuitive understanding of sampling effects

Similarities/differences between the conditions of encoding and retrieval can affect retrieval performance.

state-dependent learning

information is encoded with considerations to  the context it was presented in.

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