Priming (psychology)

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Priming is a concept in psychology to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.^[1][2][3] The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus (priming stimulus) on the processing of a second stimulus (target stimulus) that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. How quickly this effect occurs is contested;^[4][5] some researchers claim that priming effects are almost instantaneous.^[6]

Priming works most effectively when the two stimuli are in the same modality. For example, visual priming works best with visual cues and verbal priming works best with verbal cues. But priming also occurs between modalities,^[7] or between semantically related words such as "doctor" and "nurse".^[8][9]

In 2012, a great amount of priming research was thrown into doubt as part of the replication crisis. Many of the landmark studies that found effects of priming were unable to be replicated in new trials using the same mechanisms.^[10] The experimenter effect may have allowed the people running the experiments to subtly influence them to reach the desired result, and Publication bias tended to mean that shocking and positive results were seen as interesting and more likely to be published than studies that failed to show any effect of priming. The result is that the efficacy of priming may have been greatly overstated in earlier literature, or have been entirely illusory.^[11][12]