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Priming,or How to win a game of trivial pursuits.
One of the most powerful examples of how Mindspace can be applied is priming, raising subconscious notions that can powerfully influence behaviour.
Scholars Dijsterhuis and Knippenberg (1998) attempted to prove this by testing the effects of raising stereotypes on achievement in quiz games.
They tested the effects of priming participants with the idea of a professor and a football hooligan, on the assumption one was sterotyped as being intelligent and the other not.
These diagrams show how the priming of certain stereotypes in a previous session can change the degree that participants accurately answered quiz questions. This is significant given that the majority of participants believed the two sessions to have been completely independent, and even when prompted did not think that their performance in the first session could have effected their performance in the quiz.
Key points of significance
- Even short exposure had an impact, the questionnaire about professor only lasted two minutes. Although further experiments also confirmed longer exposure produced a slightly greater effect.
- Priming did more than just influence behaviour, it altered performance at a particular task.
- Participants mostly did not realise or think they had been primed.
Relevance for MyBnk
· Many of MyBnk’s programmes operate using interactive activities similar in some ways to trivial pursuits, and as such priming may be able to change successful participation in sessions.
· Provides a potentially long term reason of why young people may struggle around money matters, as stereotypes may have built up over time. As a trainer it can be worth thinking about how you may be reinforcing or challenging such stereotypes. Am I making financial matters appear technical and obscure? Is it something only for adults?
· In the short term priming may be a useful away to improve the success rate of sessions, by suggesting types of behaviour for the children to emulate.This could be something as simple as encouraging studious behaviour by the use of certain well know characters at the start of power points. Perhaps you can think of better examples, but Hermione Granger suggests better classroom example than Dennis the Menace or Horrid Henry?
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