The Power of Suggestion and Subconscious Priming
Introduction
Priming in the field of psychology is defined as the situation whereby a particular organism exposed to a given environment influences decision making in response to another stimulus without any conscious intention or guidance by other subjects. It is an individual arriving at a conclusion through exposure to an environment without directions of the path to take or a defined purpose. It is the mindset a person develops when trying to come up with an established decision. Some researches define it as a cognitive process that occurs when an individual gets exposed to one stimulus that changes organisms’ reactions in future stimuli. Priming performs best when the two environments are within a similar context. Priming is categorized into three perspectives, i.e. conceptual, perceptual and semantic. Moreover, the outcomes experienced through this condition may be positive or negative due to the rate at which priming processing takes place. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
There are several priming paradigms that medical practitioners have established to understand the concept of priming further. The choice of a particular model solemnly depends on the environmental or stimuli surroundings of an individual or organism. However, regardless of the situation, the outcomes are an affected person attains explicit awareness in which the prime mitigates the influence of the prime. Therefore, priming affects the decisions and memory of an individual in one way or another. The big question that stands out is whether it is powerful enough to be utilized in making daily choices or long-term and significant decisions?
Therefore, this paper discusses if priming might act as an influencer in the daily decisions made by everyone. However, most significant decisions arrived through priming may not be long-lasting, as many researchers suggest it to be.
Priming Discussed
Affective judgments are sometimes influenced by the perceptions of emotion information that humans perceive. However, there are unclear neural mechanisms responsible for the modulation and effective differences in sensing threats by all individuals. Subliminal affective priming studies have been conducted through recording of the potentiality of the brain to amaze faces preceded by intervals of fearful or happy prime faces. The outcomes of these studies were that the participants displayed shifts in affective rankings of surprised faces despite having no prior conscious of expressions made by prime faces.
Researchers found out that ambiguous informational interpretations seem to be sensitive in a surrounding context. The stimulus is somewhat understood as per the concepts primed through contextual elements. Hence, current studies implicate that product information in an advertisement through particular priming attributes. Contextual materials can act as an activator in specific product attributes and guide consumer’s perceptions of product data. These perceptions can result in a shift in beliefs or even the formation of a given brand, thus influencing the evaluation done by customers on a brand.
In advertising, consumers focus on the informational outcomes that a product offers is more important than the product itself. Providing adequate and reliable information is thus, a critical factor in attracting more targets. Therefore the brand advertising a specific product should pay more attention to what consumers prefer than what the company wishes to produce. This, in turn, results in giving more attention due to the lack of awareness of the consumers. In experiments conducted by scientists evidenced that hypotheses which relay the information of a product in advertisements that develops perceptions which depend on what related qualities it is primed for on the previous occasions by the following contextual factors.
Moreover, other researches illustrated the effect of personality testing on threat sensitivity, which was used in the evaluation of personal differences that might have been relevant in subliminal affective priming. The outcomes of these studies were that individuals with great features of anxiousness displayed reliable affective priming than those having a low characteristic of anxiety. The findings thus showed that information that is unconsciously perceived affects the social discernment through the alteration of analytical perceptions at an early stage. This influence draws attention to the extent that human beings are extremely sensitive to threats. Knowledge is thus influenced by many social preferences that lacked attendant awareness of similar consequences.
Sensitivity cases relating to priming differ from one age to another. Children, youths and older adults need to be advertised things that interest them. In this case, the right choice of media facilitates the carrying out of the advertisement activities. For instance, the purchase of a toy by a parent is reliant on the interests that a young kid has towards that particular toy. Therefore, brands are mandated to develop products that meet the needs of its target audiences with considerations of the benefits to be derived by the consumers. After growing them, they have to advertise the outputs through media that children interact with occasionally. For children, addressing these needs is through conducting ads through children’s networks despite their parents making the purchases for them.
On the other hand, the elderly anticipate the advertisement of their products highly through television sets as they spend more time watching for new happenings in the world. Hence, the advertisement networks for every group has to be selected with care for a comprehensive relay of relevant information for any brand
Priming also has specific impacts on the individuals that experience it. The consequences have a wide range running from a positive perspective to a negative one. This paper focuses only on the goal-seeking and motivational approaches of the priming effect and the consequences it portrays to humanity. On the short term basis, priming has small but effective results that were significant to media primes on the subsequent behaviours and judgments described by different people. The effects are, however, not homogeneous.
Moreover, they affect the instantaneous recognition or identification of something. It also affects the perceptions and judgments that people make when building considerations of choices—lastly, the behaviours, motivations and actions developed by a person. Therefore, in the short term decision-making process of individuals, priming plays a critical role.
Conclusion
In conclusion, priming is a critical plan of action inexperienced by people. It offers suggestions to what judgments or decisions that an individual can partake in when held up in a given stimulus. Priming, therefore, plays a critical role in providing recommendations for a particular situation, thus being powerful in building suggestions. Also, it offers decision-making capabilities inherently to people impacting their motivations. However, as from the explanations from the various studies in this paper, we can see that priming might not be influential in long-term decisional approaches. It works best, and it’s more consequential in the short-term as compared to the long term expectations. Thus, it cannot be relied upon in offering suggestions in future events, as some of the researchers suggest.
References
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2008.20006
https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/7195/volumes/v18/NA-18