Priming the Media Circus

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Priming in Marketing Good Strategy or Manipulation?

Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author of the bestselling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, observed:

What we think of as freewill is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act€and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Ten years later, that statement is still true.

Gladwell was referring to a psychological phenomenon known as priming. As humans, our actions and decisions are often largely determined by input we do not even consciously categorize as having occurred at all. We are, for better or worse, highly susceptible to even the most subtle suggestions.

Using Priming for Good

There are many benefits to using priming in marketing strategy. If used carefully and ethically, it can be effective in a wide range of uses. Either way, it shouldn't be ignored as an element of strategy. While there is still much to learn about the complexities of the human psyche, marketing strategies at their best incorporate what science has revealed about the human mind.

By seeking to understand the needs, desires, and motivating forces behind consumer behavior, those who design marketing campaigns can use the knowledge learned to increase consumer engagement and satisfaction, ultimately driving sales growth and better brand recognition.

https://816nyc.com/using-priming-in-mark...ipulation/

Priming, Assimilation Bias, Social Proof in Social Media
 
Who has the better budget plan? Who has the heart of the middle class voters? How are social media users trying to influence their favorite candidates? In an effort to understand some of these questions, it is probably useful to draw some background knowledge from social theories and psychological research to understand these phenomenons.

First, there is the research on impression formation. Psychologists have long known that impression formation is deeply connected to priming effects, but yet are the subject of considerable debate. Priming is the exposure of some stimulus influencing the response to a later stimulus, including perceptual, semantic, or conceptual stimulus repetition. For example, repeatedly seeing the word "economy" associated with a candidate help influence voters to think that particular candidate cares more about the economy.

Second, once the impression forms, clearly there is a lot of Assimilation Bias going on in social media. Also called confirmation bias, this is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms to their beliefs or hypotheses. We all would like to believe that voters are rational actors that evaluate the evidence presented by the candidates equally, and then make an informed decision, but in fact, of course that's not the case. What's worse is that Assimilation Bias contributes directly to Attitude Polarization, with people holding on to their belief stronger by actually searching for and interpreting evidence selectively.
 
Third, once attitude polarization sets in, it appears that Social Proof adds fuel to the fire. Social Proof is the social psychology fancy word for herd behavior --- the tendency to assume the action of others reflect the correct thing to do. (Sometimes network analysts will refer to this as Preferential Attachment if they're talking about tie formation [4].) Therefore, a voter living in a blue neighborhood is more likely to vote blue, and vice versa.  It's conformity, pure and simple.

https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/156...a/fulltext

Mere Exposure Effect

The mere exposure effect describes the phenomenon that simply encountering a stimulus repeatedly somehow makes one like it more. Perhaps the stimulus is a painting on the wall, a melody on a radio, or a face of a person you pass by every day €somehow all these stimuli tend to “grow on you. The mere exposure effect is technically defined as an enhancement of attitude toward a novel stimulus as a result of repeated encounters with that stimulus. Interestingly, the mere exposure effect does not require any kind of reward for perceiving the stimulus. All that is required is that the stimulus is merely shown, however briefly or incidentally, to the individual. So, for example, briefly glimpsing a picture or passively listening to a melody is enough for the picture and melody to become preferred over pictures and melodies that one has not seen or heard before. In short, contrary to the adage that familiarity breeds contempt, the mere exposure effect suggests just the opposite: Becoming familiar with a novel stimulus engenders liking for the stimulus.

In the domain of advertising, researchers have shown that unobtrusive exposure to cigarette brands enhances participants’ brand preference and their purchase intentions. Even peoples aesthetic inclinations are shaped by mere exposure. For example, adult preferences for impressionistic paintings were found to increase as the frequency of occurrence of the images of the paintings in library books increased. In another study, subjects were incidentally exposed to various pieces of orchestral music at varying frequencies. Again, as the number of exposures to a piece of orchestral music increased, then so did the subjects liking ratings for the music.

A competing class of explanations seeks the answer in more perceptual and cognitive processes and treats the mere exposure effect as a kind of implicit memory phenomenon. One proposal suggests that repeated exposure gradually strengthens a stimulus memory trace and thus enhances the ease of its later identification. This ease of perception can elicit positive affect because it allows people to better deal with the stimulus in a current situation. The positive affect created by the ease of perception may, of course, generalize to the nature of the stimulus, or participants own mood, explaining a relatively wide scope of mere exposure effects. Importantly, for this process to occur, participants should not know why the stimulus is easy to process. Otherwise, they are unlikely to attribute the sense of positivity from the ease of perceiving the stimulus to an actual preference for the stimulus. This idea explains why mere exposure effects are stronger when stimuli are presented subliminally and when stimuli are not recognized from the exposure phase. Furthermore, the ease of perception idea explains why the mere exposure effect is more easily obtained for more complex stimuli because their memory traces are more likely to benefit from progressive strengthening by repetition. Finally, the perceptual account of the mere exposure effect fits well with many other studies suggesting that other ways of enhancing the ease of stimulus perception of a single stimulus (e.g., via stimulus contrast, duration, clarify, or priming) tend to enhance participants liking for those stimuli in ways comparable to repetition.

https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/soci...re-effect/
Here is a little experiment demonstrating the mere-exposure effect. The mere-exposure effect is well known in Social Psychology. We will cover many studies on this effect in future episodes...

 

In contrast to agitation is the propaganda of integration

https://communication-breakdown.com/2020...ropaganda/