No B.S Friday: This experiment from some cheeky psychologist really got me thinking.
I was reading about a psychology experiment that kind of blew my mind the other day.
Subjects would go to the testing lab. Then the experimenter would hand them some simple word problems. The subjects had to unscramble the words and put them in the right order.
So, “they her bother usually”, becomes “they usually bother her” and so on.
When the subject finishes, they have to go out and find the experimenter and give their paper to them.
Only the experimenter is in conversation with someone and is not giving the subject eye contact.
And so this is the real test. What does the subject do? Do they interrupt or do they wait patiently?
Well, it depends.
It depends on what words they were exposed to.
Half the subjects were giving words that were aggressive, rude or forceful. “They usually interrupt her.”
The other half were given words that were polite, submissive or meek. “The are usually polite to her.”
The ones that were given aggressive words, interrupted the experimenter to tell her that they’d finished.
The ones that were given meek words, didn’t. They waited ten minutes until the experimenter was done with her conversation.
… what?
The words you were primed with had a massive impact on how you behaved.
Your behaviour changes with the kinds of words you read.
Isn’t that bonkers?
And what the researchers found was the effect holds across a number of words. People who were exposed to words about the elderly walked more slowly. People exposed to words about ‘professors’ did better at trivial pursuit!
But that’s not even the craziest thing.
The effect still holds even if the subjects were given the words subliminally – flashed up on a screen too quickly for the conscious mind to register.
But the mind did register it somewhere.
And their behaviour changed as a result.
This is wild.
The key thing that researchers like John Bargh (who came up with the above experiments) concluded is that the unconscious mind is powerful in ways we can barely comprehend.
What we do consciously matters.
But what happens unconsciously has a much bigger impact on the way we live our lives and the kinds of lives we end up enjoying.
To me, the implications of that are massive.
It means that we have to be super careful about the kinds of things we are exposed to – even in micro doses.
Everything registers and everything has its impact.
And so are you exposing yourself to inspiring stories of people living courageously and doing amazing things?
Or are you exposing yourself to people being petty and mean to each other, and wasting their lives on gossip?
Are you staring a blank wall, or a beautiful and inspiring piece of art?
Everything in your environment has a substantial impact on how you live your life – and a much bigger impact than we realise.
And so we have to curate our environment careful. (And you have to read inspiring blogs by scallywag property investors – and you have to get your friends to read them too.)
It’s too important just to leave to chance.
JG.