Manipulation Revealed: Influencing Intelligence via Priming and Placebo Effects? (Psychology)

hello and welcome back to the world of psychology can intelligence be influenced via priming and placebo effects in 1986 a very influential study was published it's six been cited more than six hundred and eighty times and in this famous study six priming experiments were conducted priming you will say what's priming to explain this let's first have little experiment all you have to do is think of an even number between 50 and 100 but it shouldn't be a number that consists of twice the same digit so 55 wouldn't work because it's first of all not even and it consists of twice the same digit so make it random just take the number that comes to your mind take whatever feels good for you you got a number ok then I'll try to figure out what's your number I'll say 68 or 86 but I'm quite sure there isn't 8 and or a six if I got it right you might be sitting there and thinking what but in fact I'm not a mind-reader even though many mentalists use the same techniques which are first of all if you play this game the odds are on your side for any reason people decide more often to choose 68 or 86 but there's also something else going on I tried to prime you and if you go back to the start you will realize that there is a strange of the numbers 86 68 6 and sometimes I even try to create sounds that were near to 6 right just make it random or it's 6 been sighted and by doing this I tried to prime you so the idea is to activate the neural networks in your brain that are responsible for the numbers 8 & 6 and as these regions are still well you could say glowing like glowing electric wires as these regions are still a little activated the probability that you choose these numbers in this little game increased it's not a guarantee but you can increase the probability by doing this if you think this sounds crazy you will be very surprised what's going to come now in the study I mentioned at the beginning of the episode and which of course was not published in 1986 but in 1998 by Dykstra house and Clinton burg titled the relation between perception and behavior or how to win a game of Trivial Pursuit in this study for priming experiments not six were conducted and the research question was can we influence the performance of subjects by making them think about a very clever person for example thinking about a professor so in the first experiment 60 undergraduate students of the University of Nijmegen were divided into three groups one group was asked to list the behaviors to lifestyle and appearance attributes of a typical professor another group this was the active control group was asked to write down the typical behavior lifestyle of a secretary and the third group had to do none of these afterwards the participants were told here we have a general knowledge test from another Department it's from the personality Department and they are just trying to develop a new general knowledge scale so please try to answer as many questions as possible altogether there were 42 questions from the well-known game Trivial Pursuit questions like what's the capital of Bangladesh a Dhaka be annoyed see young on the Bangkok of course participants were asked at the end of the experiment well did you realize that there might have been a link between the two experiments and it turned out they had no idea so the results are really amazing because indeed participants who were thinking about the typical lifestyle of a professor clearly outperformed the two other groups in a second experiment dice the hoist and qanitin' Berg wanted to figure out well does it make any difference if the priming procedure is extended so this time they compared thinking about the professor for nine minutes with thinking about professor for two minutes and not thinking about a professor at all again there seem to be a clear priming effect and the longer the participants thought about the professor the better they performed in the general knowledge test in a third experiment for time reasons we will leave out the fourth experiment in third experiment they try to figure out well if you make participants think about a not so clever person like for example a hooligan who is at least regarded as not that intelligent might this deteriorate your performance on a general knowledge test and indeed they observed thinking about a hooligan for nine minutes or for two minutes but then the effect seemed smaller made participants perform worse so the conclusion of these experiments really seemed to be if you want to win a game of Trivial Pursuit make your opponent think of hooligans and you yourself think about the professor this will improve your chances to win is priming such a powerful tool are we influenced that easy well some scientists are highly skeptical there is no doubt that priming exists and there is no doubt that we can be manipulated by priming but the question is is the effect really dead strong and especially the idea that intelligent behavior can be primed is under attack its attacked by a study by David Chang's and colleagues published in 2013 titled priming intelligent behavior and elusive phenomenon in this study eight experiments were conducted aiming to replicate the results of deixar Hoyles and other scientists that published studies on this topic and in not one of David Chang's experiments a significant result was found even though it's also rights to say that some of these experiments were underpowered so they weren't enough participants to make a possible effect visible but there are at least two experiments that should be taken seriously because they were pretty close replications of the former studies by Dykstra hoods and qanitin' Berg and these were the experiments three and four we will take a look especially at experiment four because there was a large number of subjects altogether 100 participants in this experiment they compared the two groups of the former study from Daiso hoods and qanitin' burg which showed the biggest effects when primed and they compared these groups so they had one group of 50 participants who were thinking about a professor for five minutes and they had another group of 50 participants thinking about hooligans for five minutes and keeping in mind that there has been a really big effect for these two groups in the original study it's very surprising that shanks and colleagues couldn't find any significant difference between these two groups there's been a numerical effect in the right direction but it was far from being significant you so why did the replication fail right now there is a very heated discussion in the most popular science journals and of course Updike's the horse is defending his original results and he puts forward that there might have been too much noise in the experiments of david shanks and colleagues which might have covered up the priming effects for example if the instructions are provided by a person instead of by a computer like in the original study this might have an influence and in priming studies seemingly small influences can have a huge effect so this really might be one reason another reason may be the difficulty of the used general knowledge test in fact in the studies from dykes toys participants were able to solve some more questions than in the study of shanks and as self-efficacy might be a mediator in priming intelligent behavior the participants in the study of shanks couldn't experience or at least to a lesser degree that they were able to answer the questions and so this might be a reason why the effect disappeared but also shanks and colleagues have some ideas why the replication failed for example the observed effects from dykes toys and canoeing burg might be demand effects the participants might have figured out what the hypothesis is and therefore they behaved according to the hypothesis even though this is plausible the experiment number six of shanks own study speaks against it because in this experiment the participants were told what the hypothesis is and as a result they were far from behaving according to their hypothesis in fact it seemed they were behaving reactant but if that's not the case how can the results of dykes alloys and Limburg be explained shanks and colleagues say well these results are probably false positives which might be caused by a post hoc selection of data so maybe dice alloys and Nitin Berg conducted more than four experiments maybe they conducted six or seven and in three there were no significant effects and they only published the four experiments with significant effects furthermore in this whole research field there might be a general publication bias which means experiments with positive results are published there as experiments that failed to produce significant results were not published and indeed this is a problem in psychology but also in other sciences Jonah's are interested in positive results and it's and it's much harder to get negative results published even though because of such issues we are talking about right now there is a rethinking taking place at the moment especially the importance of replication studies is more and more accepted the last point of criticism by shanks and colleagues is a sideswipe at diederich stop who is a former social psychologist that worked in the same research field like dykes to hoist and who as well is coming from the Netherlands and who is known to have committed research fraud he changed that he even made up data on his own he did everything that is against the code of honor in science and many of his studies have been retracted up to know and maybe there are still some to follow stopple swore that he had committed his research fraud all alone he said he had no accomplices but of course people who work with him are now discredited and I want to make it clear up to now there is absolutely no reason to say that up takes the horse is in any way involved in such fraudulent behavior so I guess at the moment it's a quite unpleasant time for him to be a social psychologist in the Netherlands at the time of the direct double who is probably the biggest betrayal of social psychology or of psychology ever last but not least we will take a short look at the question whether it's possible to improve cognitive performance via placebo effects therefore I want to introduce to you a nice little study little because there were just 40 participants taking part the study was published by Woolridge vega and steve loanin in I think December 2012 and its title is mobilizing unused resources using the placebo concept to enhance cognitive performance all participants were asked to answer general knowledge questions presented on a computer and in fact the questions were the same like in the study of dykes the oils for example how much is the number P all participants went through three phases the first phase was the warm-up phase in which they were presented the questions and right before the questions the correct answer was presented in the calibration phase the presentation time of the answers became shorter and shorter up to the point where they were no longer able to read the answers so up to this point there were no differences between the placebo group and the control group but now the participants of the placebo group who were told well they're going to be a super liminal priming the answers we'll still be presented but so short that you won't be able to recognize them but your subconscious will be able to read the right answers and on some level you will feel that you already know the answer in the control group participants were told well you see they're going to be a flash right before you have to answer the question well this flash just indicates the beginning of a new trial and indeed it turned out that the subjects who thought they were subliminally primed were really able to answer more questions now you will say well maybe they were subliminally primed no because what was presented was not a right answer what was presented was just a sequence of random numbers so what these preliminary results can tell us I say preliminary because they were really not many participants and there was just one cognitive test in future studies there should be more participants and more tests to observe this effect but maybe the participants were able to show a better performance because they experienced less anxiety and less mind-wandering I mean last episode we were talking about the deteriorating effects of mind wandering and maybe if you have the feeling well I can trust my subconscious it will have the right answer for me these deteriorating effects are no longer present so the bottom line of this episode is priming exists there's no doubt that it exists how strong the effect of prior on intelligent behavior really is we'll have to show in future studies and trust in your subconscious might improve your chances on a game of Trivial Pursuit