Mind Control? Not Quite, It's Just Psychology.

Ever since beginning to look into psychology, I've thought of it as something that can be useful to anyone, anytime, anywhere. The more you know about how the human mind works, the more you know about yourself and everyone around you. Because of this, I've chosen to study psychology in my senior research project. Perhaps at the end of my study, I'll have made some interesting psychological discoveries that can be useful to everyone's daily life.

Let's jump right in. Here are a couple situations that you'll probably find pretty familiar.

1. Remember that class where your eyelids seemed to have weights attached to them and you wondered why the hands on the clock behind you were moving so slowly? You might have resisted the temptation to pass out on your desk only to find your head is bobbing up and down every so often as you drifted in and out of sleep. You reassured yourself that you'd been learning or perhaps listening even though your eyes were closed, but let's be honest, you hadn't been.

2. Now think back to that class where you were feeling pretty good about learning. You were excited to jot down every word on the powerpoint in front of you and you were determined to take the most aesthetic set of notes you'd ever taken. Learning is so fun, you told yourself, and you probably aced the quiz on whatever it is you learned that day. 

We all want to be able to have more of the second situation and less of the first, but how can we make this change? What's the difference between the two situations? Well, maybe you forgot your morning coffee in the first situation, or maybe you just forgot to go to bed on time, but what about those days where you have one class where you're alert and as ready to learn as ever, and the next class is the complete opposite? I believe that there may be psychological solutions to this dilemma. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I can cure fatigue or lack of interest with a bit of psychology I've researched in high school. I'm simply hoping to increase the likelihood of situation two and decrease the likelihood of situation one in the classroom. My research will attempt to do this through a psychological phenomenon called priming. Here's a basic definition of priming:

"Priming is what we call it when exposure to some thing influences the behavior of an individual later on, without that individual being aware that the first thing is guiding their behavior to a certain extent." 

Click here to see where I got that definition and for more detail with some cool examples.

So priming is a pretty cool concept, and a fellow student remarked that it was kind of like simple (albeit unreliable) mind control.

If you think about it, priming is used everywhere in our daily lives. Have you ever spent more than usual on wine at a fancy restaurant? Perhaps the restaurant was playing classical music, subconsciously pushing you towards a higher bill at the end of the meal. Classical music has been shown to be an effective 'prime' that gives people a tendency to spend more on wine. Here's the study. There are even several studies on how music can influence the way wine tastes!

What else can priming do? Studies have gone as far as to give evidence that priming with money can make people act more selfishly or that priming with words related to the elderly can even make people walk more slowly! These studies are questioned today since they haven't yet been replicated, but one priming experiment with racial stereotypes and academic performance has been widely accepted as true. Basically, adding a question about race before a standardized test significantly worsened African-American students' performance on that test compared to white students of similar previous testing scores. (Feel free to read more on the study here.)

All of this research on priming gave me reason to ask myself the following question: what if priming could be used to change students' attitudes in class? Maybe listening to some upbeat classical music in the background before class started could unconsciously prime for alertness. Maybe it could give students a feeling of sophistication (which is most likely what it did for wine buyers in the aforementioned experiment) that inspires them to want to become as educated as possible and have a 'situation two' type of class. Maybe visual priming with words associated with the same concepts of alertness and sophistication or others such as drive and success could give students subconscious incentive to pay more attention in class.

To conduct this research, I will have the pleasure of working with NAU MS Candidate Mackenzie Onofry and our generous math and statistics teacher here at BASIS, Chris Lamb.

I can't guarantee that my ideas will work, but if you're interested in the possibility, this blog is for you.

P.S. For a bunch of background info that will help you understand everything in this blog, follow the link on the sidebar to Everything You Need To Know. Read this!