Never Leave Your Room

"Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping."

That's from Piet Hein, a poet (and mathematician) I recommend. But I'm afraid I don't see the link to priming.

I've tried this in the past, but now I find I can tell how I'd feel without flipping the coin. If I'm unsure about a decision, flipping the coin no longer helps - it just brings to mind what I don't like about whichever option comes up.

I found, that for me, the same thing works well without a coin. If I am ambivalent on decisions, I just pick one and if I instantly have a feeling that I should have gone the other way, I will switch. The problem with the algorithm is that it when the choices are actually close to equivalent, it takes a bit of strength of will not to repeat the process ad nauseam.

This sounds like using the observation of your spontaneous rationalization to figure out what you think is actually true, mastering rationalization to point the way to the right answer. Truly bizarre.

My ex used to privately assign two menu items to the numbers one and two, and then ask me aloud to pick one or two, then see how she felt about my response.

Thanks for the link, very interesting indeed.

In my case, though,I could hear a few words the first time I listened to the sine-wave modulated version. It became much clearer after listening to the primer, though.

Sadly, once you've heard the primer, you can't really go back to hearing it the way you heard it the first time, so you can't compare back to back. It's a bit like "hidden" messages in songs; once you hear them, it very hard to revert back to hearing the original lyrics.

Hmm.

I found that with all of those I could make out at least some, and in some cases all, of the words in the sine-wave versions without the "priming" original recording. The very first example on that page was pretty much perfectly clear to me on the first listening; others were more work.

Then, for the ones where I hadn't been able to make out all the words in the sine-wave version, I listened to the "primer" and tried again with the sine waves. In each case, I found that I could then recognize the words I'd found unclear before, but I wouldn't say they were "clear as day" or anything like; more like "well, OK, I suppose it could be interpreted that way".

The effect of priming, for me, therefore appears to be very small.

I tried the first pair on my wife, and her response appears to be the canonical one. Obviously I'm just strange. Anyone else have the same experience as me?

Of the five recordings on that page I was able to figure out three without listening to the clear speech.

Why do you expect the decision made in a default state to be more accurate than if it's modified by an unknown factor? If you don't expect to be primed in any particular direction, you may as well be swayed towards the right choice.

Besides Yvain's point about noise, I would point out that we live in a society that systematically seeks to distort our decisions toward non-optimal decisions. I refer to the >$150 billion advertising industry.

I certainly don't believe that a supermarket's many careful product placements and signs and illustrations are priming me to shop more rationally than I would without those stimuli.

I'm interpreting priming as like random noise, since we don't know which direction it will move my estimate. Assuming my rational decision process is better than picking a result at random, adding random noise to it will on average lower its effectiveness.

See also: footnote 3. Since the people not primed by being in a school came to a different result, and since it seems they must have thought about schools at least once when deciding about a school funding initiative, it seems likely that there's something about an external stimulus that's different from an internal one.

When any shadow can influence the outcome, your decision is probably no good to start with, and adding some unexpected noise won't hurt that much.

I doubt that.

That's a very interesting idea. Again, it reminds me of certain forms of magic - for example, of magic practioners who used to surround themselves with imagery of the God of Music before a music recital on the theory it would help them play better. I wish there were studies as to the effectiveness of that, but it's kind of hard to get funding to study magic. I suspect that saying a prayer to God for help resisting temptation may work in the same way - you're activating your concept of God and with it the entire religious system of morality and self-control. In the same way, giving yourself a reminder of rationalism or even reciting one of those rationalist litanies might make the stuff you learn here more salient.

Tell you what - tattoo "Less Wrong" on your palm and post a picture on here, and I'll upvote ten of your comments. Ten karma points! Think about it! That would totally be worth it!

Can we use this to our advantage? Maybe tattoo "Less Wrong" on one's palm and look at it when in distress?

btw, this is almost the sort of thing a chaos magician would do. They would create a symbol by smashing the letters in Less Wrong together and then tattoo the created symbol on their palm. Or at least keep copies of it around all the time.. Perhaps the symbol has more priming power than mere words. Any evidence of this?

Ah, the mystery of the undecided voter :-)

I am not a psychologist, but every time I've come across priming it has been presented as a short-term phenomenon caused by temporary brain activation. I don't think what you're describing could be called priming.

But I have heard of some results along those lines. For example, if you learn something in for example a classroom, you are more likely to remember it on a test given in a classroom than in (for example) a church, and vice versa (link to study). And this even generalizes to people who learn something in a red room recalling it better in other red places (link to study) That makes effects like the one you describe sound possible, though I don't know of any studies of it directly.

Sheldon Solomon, one of the big names behind terror management theory, was the one who conducted the WTC study. He also did a related experiment in the same study where he made people think about their own deaths and found they were more likely to vote Bush afterwards. I think there's a description at the same link. Good catch.