Our Irrational Selves - The Priming Effect

You are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. This is what I kept hearing and reading about. I wanted to see if there's some scientific rationale behind this over-inflated self-development cheap talk.

Getting through the monumental work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman entitled Thinking Fast and Slow was not an easy task. But it was the first step and it was extremely revealing.

You see, we humans are creatures of habit, not of careful reasoning. We see patterns even where there are none. Every day we fall prey to a whole host of cognitive biases. It's challenging to avoid them even if you are aware of them.

One such fallacy is the priming effect. To investigate it further, I searched for relevant studies on the topic. Here are the titles of a few:

Behavioral Priming – It’s all in the Mind, but whose Mind – published 2012, 265 citations
Just Going Along – Nonconscious Priming – published 1999, 161 citations
Priming and Human Memory Systems – published 1990, 2500 citations
Repetition Priming and Automaticity – published 1990, 515 citations
Specificity of Priming – Cognitive Neuroscientific Perspective – published 2004, 233 citations

The Priming Effect

A short definition of the priming effect is that it represents 'an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus'. more

Here's a good video that explains priming in layman terminology:

In simple practical translation: the thoughts, feelings, people you are immediately exposed to will likely have an influence on future 'you'. Well, isn't this kindof' obvious?

It is so obvious that we never really take time to think about it enough. Yet it has such a profound effect on who/what we become in life. As Darren Hardy puts it in The Compound Effect:

“Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences: input (what you feed your mind), associations (the people with whom you spend time), and environment (your surroundings).”

The idea of you being the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time with can be taken even further. I am inclined to say that you are the average of the top few stimuli you are mostly exposed to. Examples of stimuli:

• people you spend time with
• input you feed into your mind (from online/offline)
• your daily activities
• habits
• and even your own thoughts

Feed yourself with junk stimuli and you can guess what happens.

The beauty of it is that you can, at any moment, determine the direction of your life:

• you can stop/limit the time spent with toxic people
• you can increase time spent with nourishing people. It can be in person - preferably - or by attending to their online social feeds, videos, interviews, etc
• you can start implementing good daily habits one at a time (wake up earlier, exercise, go to sleep earlier, etc.)
• whenever you catch yourself going down a negative thinking cascade, stop. Take a second and look at it in retrospect. Analyze the situation and you'll most often not allow yourself to proceed toward the degrading mental path
• and I could go on with the examples.

It's all about deliberate practice and being consciously aware of 'you' and your progression in life.

Here's an example I gave in an earlier post on my blog:

If your Facebook feed only shows you entertaining information there is not much that you can grow from. There is no water and there are no nutrients to grow the seed, no nourishing ground.

Your only possible short-lived benefit may be a small squirt of dopamine. Keep doing it and you’re in for self-destruction.

I am not implying that everyone needs/wants to live a good life – otherwise they may be more careful in curating what they are exposed to.

On the other hand, deliberate exposure to information/people/thoughts/stimuli that could improve your skills and consistent practice may point you in a better direction.

From my Life

I tried teaching myself programming on various occasions and I failed miserably every single time. Looking back I could say I was inconsistent. I did not invest enough time and enough PRACTICE. I did not expose myself to coding often enough.

And by exposure I mean: reading about code, coding, watching live demos of coding, taking online courses on coding, talking to other coders. This is how I would have primed myself to coding, hence I would have further promoted the development of this skill.

But things changed recently as I got more aware of the situation. I, once again, purposed to teach myself coding. I started breaking the chain of inconsistency. It was very challenging the first 2-3 weeks because I had to go through the frustration of not understanding much. Plus, it was very time consuming. Being exposed to so much Python code everyday led me to dreaming about code at night, which may sound ridiculous, but that's what happened.

My efforts have started to pay off because with more exposure and practice I became more familiar with the code. I primed myself to it. I developed a daily habit toward it. Now, I have to spend at least 1 hour per day exposed to code in one way or another: coding, watching a video, or reading about it. Where will this lead to?

As I become better => I have to keep challenging myself with harder problems, otherwise I may stale my progression. So, it's a never ending game. But I feel it's more like a never ending joy once you force yourself through the intense and frustrating initiation period.

Ending Thoughts

My example about coding can be extrapolated to all sorts of other life experiences.

If I spend most of my time with 5 (or a few) people that are better than me, it's obvious (unless I'm a retard) that there are high chances for me to improve my life. And, again, 'spending time' does not necessarily mean to be with those people physically. It may be convenient to spend time with them by reading their books, watching their videos, or peeking at their social profiles.

It's all about awareness + deliberate practice.

You move in the direction of the top few stimuli you expose yourself to: people, information, media, thoughts, environment, etc. Careful to make wise choices! They decide your future.

You really become what you choose to think of consistently.

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Image Credit

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author