Applications Of Priming

As described earlier, priming is the psychological strategy of initiations of particular responses, unconsciously to stimuli based on our preconceived stimuli and our responses to them. This wryt-up deals with how this technique is employed in various areas of daily life, even in shaping results and outcomes.

Priming is a huge component of advertising. Swaying public opinion and appealing to their subconscious minds is what's done by specific colour schemes, logos, placing of elements in ads, posters and banners. A common example is - use of red colour in fast food brands as the colour red is known to arouse the hunger and make the people more likely to go, grab an item.

Another example is the titles of Harry Potter series movies, which progressively become darker and darker, signifying the darkening of the war between Harry and lord Voldemort. This led to the subconscious feeling of being led to a dark, difficult conclusion to the viewers.

Priming can also sharpen memory skills, social skills, and increase career achievement. There are plenty of self-help books out there doing just that. Personal trainers pushing you to do better and come out of your comfort zone are actually priming you to respond accordingly.

Psychological therapies in which the therapists encourage the patients to discuss everything, thereby motivating them to look at the brighter side of the coin are also positive priming them, which stimulates positive ideas and feelings. Talk therapy is one of these novel ways of mental healing. Stress, depression, all such problems can be addressed through priming.

Not only that, our mantras in yoga, worshipping, etc. were a manner of tuning our minds to positive frequencies, i.e., eradicating all negatives out of oneself and embracing the positive stimulus, before initiating the act. Continuous repetition of these mantras actually primes the practitioner to positivity.

Negative priming is enforced in rehabilitation centres to stimulate the recipient towards the ill-effects of the bad habit/ addiction they want to leave.

Positive priming can be used to prime for positive associations when working towards facing one's phobias, or to help control compulsive behaviors. Exposure therapy , which helps to replace negative associations with neutral or positive ones, is often used for helping individuals with phobias to overcome their fear.

One major use of priming is in structuring the associations in various entities while studying. Examples include - patterns created to memorize mathematical formulae, flowcharts to remember procedures/cyclic information, etc. All of the science students are familiar with the hilarious mnemonics we used to learn the periodic table! Or, the ABCD poem we learnt in our childhood days to learn the alphabet! All this is due to researchers telling that repetition and association increase a student's ability to recall all types of information.

All these examples show us how vastly this subconscious cognition of ours impacts our decisions and can be utilised to benefit us in so many ways. Certainly, priming plays a very important role in all walks of life.