Rubens Scarelli


Answer the following questions as quickly as you can. What's a common abbreviation for Coca-Cola? What do we call the sound a frog makes? What is a comedian's funny story called? What do we call the white of an egg? When asked these four questions most people reply, rapidly and effortlessly: Coke, croak, joke and yolk. Maybe you did the same. If so, your final answer was, of course, wrong. For the record, egg white is called albumen.

This party trick demonstrates two important facts about the brain. The first is that much of the time we think like zombies. By that I mean our thinking is rapid, automatic and occurs outside of our conscious awareness. The second is that "priming" has a significant ability to influence our thoughts. In the example, Coke, croak and joke "primed" your brain to impulsively offer a rhyming answer (ie yolk), despite its being incorrect. Whether you realise it or not, you are primed to act in particular ways many times each day, especially by advertising. 

Sometimes this is done in an obvious way, when a brand or product is overtly presented, thereby priming you to think about it while shopping. But subtler methods are also used; in a semi-overt prime, a word, image or logo is displayed in plain sight, but without attention being directed specifically towards it. The results of exposure to a brand even in this seemingly innocuous way can be startling. Studies found that discreetly displaying the logo of a well-known fast-food restaurant in the laboratory primed volunteer test subjects to eat more rapidly and to be less patient. Similarly, a credit-card symbol can prime subjects to spend more money. 

Nor are such influences short-lived. In one intriguing experiment, some volunteers answering questions online about their voting intentions had a small image of the US flag (72 x 45 pixels) attached to the top left-hand corner of the survey form. The researchers reported that this subtle exposure to the American flag significantly shifted both Democratic and Republican participants' beliefs, attitudes and voting behaviour towards Republicanism. 

Most surprisingly, even subliminal priming, in which the word or image is presented too rapidly to be consciously perceived, can exert a powerful effect on behaviour. Participants shown pictures of Coke cans and the word "thirsty" for just 23 milliseconds reported feeling thirstier than those who were unprimed. In another study, when the words "Lipton Ice" were subliminally shown to subjects, this greatly increased their preference for that brand. 

In my laboratory we have been -developing technologies to explore the effects of priming on the impulsive zombie brain. One approach is to analyse the brain's electrical activity to identify which regions become most active during priming. Another involves a modified form of the Implicit Association Test. In this test, the strength of subconscious associations between different concepts is measured by recording the speed and accuracy with which people make choices. 

Using these techniques, we are exploring the use of different forms of semi-overt and subliminal primes in digital marketing campaigns and video games. Our findings indicate that even quite minor changes in typefaces, colours or images can exert a major influence over the extent to which primes influence our buying decisions. For advertisers and brand managers there is, of course, huge advantage to identifying the most efficient ways to prime shoppers so they choose their products over a rival's. And it's not just advertising; all kinds of sensory information, from smells to music, has been shown to have a significant subconscious effect on behaviour. 

The bottom line is that we now know that it's possible for your brain to receive information, even unconsciously, which then causes you to act impulsively in particular ways, once again unconsciously. Zombies aren't just confined to horror movies and Michael Jackson videos -- there is one staring right back at you when you look in a mirror.

David Lewis's Impulse: Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We Do It is out now (Random House)


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