I Think Old, Therefore I Walk Slowly

Hey all!  I hope everyone is enjoying summer.  I know I definitely haven't relaxed this much in a really long time...  Well, that's what summer is for, right?

Anyways, I was talking to my brother Dave recently, and one of the things that he was talking about was Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.  From what I remember, the book talks about two different systems in terms of processing...  I might write more about other stuff later, but one of the things that stood out to me most is what Kahneman labelled as "The Florida Effect."

This effect goes back to an experiment done by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996).  The researchers told participants that the experiment was to test language proficiency.  Participants had to form sentences of four words out of five given words.  The participants had to do this about thirty times.  After this, the participants were thanked for their time and the experiment was finished.  Or, that's what the participants thought at least...

You see, the two conditions of the experiment were an elderly prime condition and an age neutral condition.  For a basic refresher, priming refers to the idea of getting someone to mentally process a certain theme or set of words.  In this experiment with the elderly prime, participants had to do the sentence forming task with four out of the five words.  The way the priming worked is that all the words participants in the elderly condition had for forming sentences were associated with the elderly, such as Florida, old, lonely, grey, wise, etc.  For the control condition, words such as thirsty, clean, private, etc. were used.

So, what's the point?  The experimenters didn't care about any of the sentences formed by the participants.  It's quite ingenious, but experimenters wanted to see how long it took for participants to walk to the elevator after they had left the room the experiment was held in.  This may sound odd, but the crazy thing is that differences were found...  Participants in the elderly prime condition walked significantly slower to the elevator than the participants in the control condition.

Part of the craziness is that none of the words in the elderly prime condition had anything to do with slowness (something that the experimenters made sure of).  Yet, participants were still shown to walk at a significantly different pace...  The researchers concluded that whether or not the participants were aware of it, participants had mentally activated an 'elderly' stereotype.  One of the associations with elderly folk is older people tend to walk slower.  Thus, activation of the stereotype resulted in behavior consistent with the stereotype and its associations, hence the participants walking slower.

One of my teachers said that some of the craziest experiments are the one with the smallest of manipulations...  This experiment is one of these cases, and that's why it's so mind blowing to me...  It's crazy to think that something so small as just forming sentences with words associated with the elderly can lead you to acting like what you think the elderly are like, as well...  Of course, in an experimental setting, the results seem clear-cut.  Yet, how many times in a real life setting are we fully aware of all the other associations or themes we are dealing with?  I guess the root of it all is that outside influences can affect us in ways that we aren't even aware of...  Like other social psych experiments have shown, we may not be as objective and free of outside influences as we like to think...  Perhaps if we're having trouble dealing with a situation, it may be good to take a step back and just take a breather to try and refresh our look at it, no?  Anyways, I think that's good for now...  I shall be back at it soon enough!