Social Priming

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There's a field of research called social priming. The basic claim is that the subtle or unconscious influences can affect us in surprisingly profound ways. A famous study from the 90s showed that if you're exposed to stimuli briefly pertaining to old people, that subsequently makes you walk slower. So there were these miraculous seeming social priming studies.

Over the past decades, many social science studies have promised simple answers to complex problems. In his latest book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, Singal describes how many of these solutions fail because the findings they are based on turn out to be wrong or misleading.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jesse Singal sit down to discuss the reproducibility crisis in social science, whether to be skeptical about implicit bias training, and how to differentiate real solutions from illusory quick fixes.

A written transcript of this conversation is available on persuasion.community

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