Priming Performance of Economics Students: Even More Evidence

Abstract

John Bargh (2006) and several others have established that subtle, subconscious cues can affect test subjects’ behavior in a laboratory setting — the so-called “priming effect.” For example, Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996) found that participants primed with an elderly stereotype walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment compared to members of the control group. Dijksterhuis (1998) showed that priming test subjects (again, in a laboratory setting) for intelligence via exposure to an image of a professor increased performance on a general knowledge test, and priming subjects with stupidity or the stereotype of a soccer hooligan reduced scores measuring general knowledge. In three separate experiments, we primed college students either for high performance or low performance in a classroom environment. Multiple groups of students (n=306) from four colleges — one flagship state university (R2), two state universities (M1), and a community college — were either primed with images of Steve Jobs, Nick Saban, or Bill Gates (high performance), or were primed with images of Napoleon Dynamite or Bluto from Animal House (low performance). Students then watched videos of economics lectures in a classroom setting and then quizzed on lecture content. Students primed with high performance significantly outperformed those students primed for low performance.

Keywords: Economic Education, Teaching of Economics, Social Psychology

JEL Classification: A22