Knowing and Nudging Terroir: Part Five

Priming Schemas

The words, images and experiences we surround ourselves with prime us for particular thoughts and feelings that then give rise to specific behaviours and actions.

I touched on priming schemas, or the priming effect, in the paper Anxiety One: Anxiety Doesn’t Understand Logic but I do not think I ever revisited the topic in any detail. A schema, in psychology, is a readily accessible pattern of thought or behaviour. It is how we essentially categorize our world. We have a schema for a door which means we can recognize that a French door is a door as much as a solid wood door is a door. When we approach a building our schema for door is primed so that we can seamlessly go inside. 

Where it gets interesting is in our use of categories, or schemas, for self. We can prime, or activate, these schemas of self very readily and, the kicker is, often this will happen unconsciously and we are completely unaware of its influence on our actions and behaviours. 

The researcher and author, Cordelia Fine, references priming schemas in her books: A Mind of Its Own and Delusions of Gender – both books are such great reads too! To the best of my recollection I believe she does reference this specific research in one of those books: Asian women could be primed to activate their identity as women or could be primed to activate their identity as Asian prior to going into write a math exam and their scores were worse when they were primed to think of themselves as women when compared to thinking of themselves as Asian. And none of these women was aware that they were thinking of themselves as anything at all walking into the exam room—the priming had occurred without their conscious sense of it happening.

The women had internalized schemas that included societal belief systems that women are not good at math and that Asians are good at math. Priming the one schema vs. the other was enough to influence their performance on the test.

I think there is value in making the unconscious schemas of the Self more conscious and of identifying what priming effects can be applied to move things in the right direction.

We likely all have cognitive schemas of flexible, adventurous people who are very open to experience and possibility. Now this is entirely an n=1 data point, namely my own personal experience, but I prime a schema of flexibility in myself through primarily visual images of expanse and lightness. You will have to figure out what might work for you. Maybe you create a fictional adventurous character that you write about; maybe you collect and save stories of adventure and transformation in others; maybe you journal about your own past reference of adventurousness in yourself…the possibilities are as varied as the number of human beings alive today.

The point of this “prepare for the plan” piece is to just create some space for potential and to prime some schemas that will leverage that potential as well. So much of facing a chronic illness is about limits. Hard limits. Illness is a schema of limitation. There is some value in waking up a schema of possibility before embarking on a plan of habit change.

You could be the woman or the Asian woman taking that math test— same  person, different outcomes.

The Plan

We are at The PLAN. Well, almost… 

A Wide Range Where You Work Well

There was some recent research that caused a mainstream splash around changing your personality in two weeks. Subjects who wanted to be more open to experience and subjects who wanted to become more conscientious were recruited for the study. If you are interested in the study design and details, the whole paper is available here. The elegant piece of this experiment was that three additional individuals who knew the subject personally were roped in to describe any changes they had witnessed in the subject at the end of the intervention while not knowing what the subject was trying to achieve in terms of changes. The changes were noticeable to the three reporting on the subject and aligned with the self-reported changes from the subject. The changes appeared stable six weeks post study as well.

Each subject had to identify three specific behaviours related to the personality trait that they wanted to perform more frequently during the two-week intervention (try new recipes, meet new people, study everyday…depending on the trait in question). The researchers then used a coaching app that sent a reminder in the morning and a request to fill out a questionnaire in the evening. Et voilà more conscientious and open subjects at the end of the intervention.

While this may be surprising to deep experts in the expected stability of the Big Five Personality Traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), it is not surprising to me. I have long held, based on my review of the research, that the Big Five are not only malleable, but they are incredibly environmentally sensitive. 

As Charmaz pointed out above, habits are social (not just individual) and, therefore, the Self is social as we construct self-concept from self as habit.

We all know that someone who is always, always late for everything can make it on time for something that they recognize will not give them any second chance or room for lateness. We can all rise to openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness and confidence and introverts can absolutely be extraverted. These things all reside on a spectrum and we all will change it up within our broad range of Self, based on external environmental pressures placed on us to do so.

The only caveat is that the spectrum or range in which you work well can narrow when you have a load of trauma or are really struggling under heavy physical, emotional and mental symptoms.

But it is still a range. There is still room even under circumstances where you cannot stretch through the full range.

Now to The PLAN in the final Part Six of this series coming up.