How Entrepreneurs Get Duped with a Single Word: A Language Hack that Can Work For You or Against You
How Entrepreneurs Get Duped with a Single Word: A Language Hack that Can Work For You or Against You
Let’s jump right in and talk about some brain science, shall we?
In the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he shares an experiment that was one of the catalysts for my unquenchable interest in the power of language and influence.
Here’s an excerpt from Gladwell’s book:
Imagine that I’m a professor, and I’ve asked you to come and see me in my office. You walk down a long corridor, come through the doorway, and sit down at a table. In front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five-word sets. I want you to make a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as possible out of each set. It’s called a scrambled-sentence test. Ready?
- him was worried she always
- from are Florida oranges temperature
- ball the throw toss silently
- shoes give replace old the
- he observes occasionally people watches
- be will sweat lonely they
- sky the seamless gray is
- should now withdraw forgetful we
- us bingo sing play let
- sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins
That seemed straightforward, right? Actually it wasn’t. After you finished that test—believe it or not—you would have walked out of my office and back down the hall more slowly than you walked in. With that test, I affected the way you behaved. How? Well, look back at the list. Scattered throughout it are certain words, such as “worried,” “Florida,” “old,” “lonely,” “gray,” “bingo,” and “wrinkle.” You thought that I was just making you take a language test. But, in fact, what I was also doing was making the big computer in your brain—your adaptive unconscious—think about the state of being old. It didn’t inform the rest of your brain about its sudden obsession.
This test was devised by a very clever psychologist named John Bargh. It’s an example of what is called a priming experiment.
So, let’s break that down. By seeing a string of words that held an association with a certain concept (in this case: old), your subconscious mind then pieced them together without you realizing it in such a strong way that your motor skills were affected so much so that you slowed down as you walk away.
Dude.
We experience this phenomenon daily. Sometimes realizing it – usually not.
Here’s how it works.