---
title: Priming
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/
description: '"Priming" names several different ideas, and they have very different track records.'
section: Learn
---

![Illustration: a redacted-dossier collage of press photography, contact sheets and political crowds from multiple eras.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/hero-case-studies.jpg)

[Learn](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/) · Cognitive biases and heuristics

# Priming

In brief

The word covers three ideas with different track records: word-level priming is very reliable, many claims that subtle cues change behavior have failed to replicate, and political priming of issue importance falls in between.

On this page

- [In brief](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#in-brief)
- [What the research shows](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#what-the-research-shows)
- [Has it held up?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#has-it-held-up)
- [How it shows up in political messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#how-it-shows-up-in-political-messaging)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Persuasion or manipulation?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#persuasion-or-manipulation)
- [Archive techniques that lean on this](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#archive-techniques-that-lean-on-this)
- [Related topics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#related-topics)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#sources)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/priming/#images)

On this page

*Area: [Cognitive biases and heuristics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/cognitive-biases/) · Evidence:**mixed**([How we rate the evidence](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/evidence-ratings/)). Word-level priming is among the most reliable effects in psychology; many famous claims that subtle cues change behavior have failed to replicate; political "priming" of issue importance sits in between.*

## In brief

"Priming" names several different ideas, and they have very different track records. In the narrow sense, seeing one word makes related words easier to recognize for a moment, which is well established. In the broad sense popularized in the 1990s and 2000s, incidental cues (a word about old age, a picture of money, a flag) were said to change people's behavior or political views without their awareness, and many of those findings did not survive replication. In political science, "priming" usually means something else again: news coverage changing which issues people use to judge leaders, an idea with more solid support.

## What the research shows

**Semantic priming.** Meyer and Schvaneveldt showed that people decide faster that a string of letters is a real word when it follows a related word ("nurse" after "doctor") than an unrelated one [1]. This speed-up lasts fractions of a second and has been reproduced thousands of times. The Semantic Priming Project measured it for more than 1,600 target words across hundreds of participants at several universities [2]. Repetition priming, in which having seen something before makes it easier to process again, is similarly robust.

**Behavioral and social priming.** Bargh, Chen and Burrows reported that students who unscrambled sentences containing words associated with old age ("Florida", "wrinkle", "bingo") walked more slowly down a corridor afterward than students given neutral words [3]. The study became one of the most cited in social psychology and inspired a large literature claiming that brief, incidental cues could shift behavior, from test performance to generosity.

**Agenda-setting and political priming.** Iyengar and Kinder ran experiments in which participants watched lightly edited news broadcasts that gave more or less coverage to particular issues such as defense, inflation or pollution [4]. Viewers came to rate those issues as more important, and, when asked to evaluate the president, they weighted his performance on the heavily covered issues more. The authors called this second effect priming: the news does not tell people what to think of the president but changes the yardstick they use. Krosnick and Kinder found a real-world version. Survey interviews conducted just before and just after the 1986 revelation of the Iran-Contra affair showed that, afterward, Americans' views on intervention in Central America counted much more in their overall judgment of Ronald Reagan [5].

## Has it held up?

The three strands have fared very differently.

Semantic and repetition priming have held up well. They are small, short-lived effects on reaction time, measured with many trials per person, and they replicate [2].

Behavioral priming has not. Doyen and colleagues repeated the elderly-walking study with infrared sensors timing participants automatically and found no slowing [6]. Slowing appeared only when the experimenters had been led to expect it, suggesting that the original effect may have come from the experimenters' expectations rather than from the words. Other findings in this family also failed large tests. The first Many Labs project, which ran the same studies in 36 samples in many countries, could not reproduce either a money-priming effect or a flag-priming effect, while it did reproduce several classic findings such as anchoring [7]. Some researchers still defend a smaller behavioral priming effect under specific conditions, but the dramatic single-study claims should be treated as unreliable.

Political priming is on firmer ground but has its own dispute. Lenz reanalyzed several classic priming studies and argued that much of what looked like people re-weighting an issue was actually people learning where candidates stood and then adopting their preferred candidate's position [8]. On this view, coverage changes opinions about issues more than it changes the weight given to them. Agenda-setting itself, the finding that coverage raises the perceived importance of issues, is widely supported.

## How it shows up in political messaging

- **Flags and money, a cautionary case.** One widely reported study claimed that a single exposure to an American flag shifted participants toward Republican candidates and attitudes up to eight months later [9]. Another claimed that incidental images of money made people more supportive of free-market systems and social inequality [10]. Neither held up: the flag and money effects failed in Many Labs [7], and a series of direct replications found no effect of money reminders on political views [11]. Patriotic imagery in posters such as [Let's Fly This Flag: Everybody at Least 10 Percent in War Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/lets-fly-this-flag-1943/) works, when it works, through open association of the kind described under [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/), not through hidden priming.

![U.S. Treasury war-bond poster with a flag and the words Let's Fly This Flag](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/lets-fly-this-flag-1943.jpg)

*"Let's Fly This Flag: Everybody at Least 10 Percent in War Bonds," U.S. Treasury Department poster, 1943. From the FRAME gallery: [Let's Fly This Flag: Everybody at Least 10 Percent in War Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/lets-fly-this-flag-1943/)*

- **Iran-Contra, 1986.** Saturation coverage of the scandal changed which issues Americans used to judge Reagan, lowering his standing through the weight given to foreign policy [5].

![President Reagan seated between John Tower and Edmund Muskie in the Cabinet Room](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/priming-reagan-tower-commission-report-1987.jpg)

*President Ronald Reagan receiving the report of the Tower Commission on the Iran-Contra affair from commission members John Tower and Edmund Muskie, Cabinet Room, White House, 26 February 1987. White House Photographic Office; National Archives (NAID 198581). Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_President_Reagan_receiving_the_Tower_Commission_Report_in_the_Cabinet_Room_-_NARA_-_198581.jpg). Public domain (U.S. government work).*

- **Canada's 1988 "free trade election."** Johnston and colleagues found that the campaign debate over the free-trade agreement with the United States made that single issue far more central to how Canadians chose between parties by election day [12].

![President Reagan signing the United States-Canada Free Trade Agreement at a desk](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/priming-reagan-signs-canada-us-free-trade-1988.jpg)

*President Ronald Reagan signing the United States–Canada Free Trade Agreement at Sunnylands, Rancho Mirage, California, 2 January 1988. White House Photographic Office; National Archives. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Ronald_Reagan_Signing_United_States_-_Canada_Free_Trade_Agreement_at_The_Sunnylands_Annenberg_Estate_in_Rancho_Mirage_California_-_DPLA_-_d1650e5d7b17879e4467e199c2a62d2e.jpg). Public domain (U.S. government work).*

- **"It's the economy, stupid," 1992.** Bill Clinton's campaign strategists made keeping attention on the economy, rather than on foreign policy where George H. W. Bush was stronger, the organizing rule of the campaign [13]. It is a textbook attempt to set the yardstick voters use.

## How to spot it

- Ask which issue a message wants you to judge by, and whether that is the issue you would choose.
- Notice when a campaign or outlet repeats one topic heavily just before a decision point.
- Be skeptical of claims that a subliminal image, word or symbol changes votes or behavior; most such findings have failed to replicate.
- Check whether coverage volume matches the issue's actual importance or merely its usefulness to one side.

## Persuasion or manipulation?

Arguing that a particular issue should matter most is a normal and honest part of politics, and every campaign does it. It becomes manipulation when an issue is kept in view by manufactured events, flooding or misleading coverage in order to push aside issues voters would otherwise weigh, or when a message relies on claims about hidden psychological levers that it would not defend openly. Honest writing says why an issue deserves priority and leaves readers able to weigh the others.

## Archive techniques that lean on this

- [Flooding the zone](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/flooding-the-zone/) — Flooding the zone: saturates attention so one frame dominates the yardstick people use, the agenda-setting side of priming.

## Related topics

- [Framing effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/framing-effect/) — Framing effect
- [Availability heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/availability-heuristic/) — Availability heuristic
- [Anchoring](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/anchoring/) — Anchoring
- [Illusory truth effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/illusory-truth-effect/) — Illusory truth effect

## Sources

1. Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. *Journal of Experimental Psychology*, 90(2), 227–234.
2. Hutchison, K. A., Balota, D. A., Neely, J. H., Cortese, M. J., Cohen-Shikora, E. R., Tse, C.-S., Yap, M. J., Bengson, J. J., Niemeyer, D., & Buchanan, E. (2013). The semantic priming project. *Behavior Research Methods*, 45(4), 1099–1114.
3. Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 71(2), 230–244.
4. Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. R. (1987). *News That Matters: Television and American Opinion*. University of Chicago Press.
5. Krosnick, J. A., & Kinder, D. R. (1990). Altering the foundations of support for the president through priming. *American Political Science Review*, 84(2), 497–512.
6. Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C.-L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). Behavioral priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind? *PLoS ONE*, 7(1), e29081.
7. Klein, R. A., Ratliff, K. A., Vianello, M., Adams, R. B., Jr., Bahník, Š., Bernstein, M. J., et al. (2014). Investigating variation in replicability: A "many labs" replication project. *Social Psychology*, 45(3), 142–152.
8. Lenz, G. S. (2009). Learning and opinion change, not priming: Reconsidering the priming hypothesis. *American Journal of Political Science*, 53(4), 821–837.
9. Carter, T. J., Ferguson, M. J., & Hassin, R. R. (2011). A single exposure to the American flag shifts support toward Republicanism up to 8 months later. *Psychological Science*, 22(8), 1011–1018.
10. Caruso, E. M., Vohs, K. D., Baxter, B., & Waytz, A. (2013). Mere exposure to money increases endorsement of free-market systems and social inequality. *Journal of Experimental Psychology: General*, 142(2), 301–306.
11. Rohrer, D., Pashler, H., & Harris, C. R. (2015). Do subtle reminders of money change people's political views? *Journal of Experimental Psychology: General*, 144(4), e73–e85.
12. Johnston, R., Blais, A., Brady, H. E., & Crête, J. (1992). *Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election*. Stanford University Press.
13. Matalin, M., & Carville, J., with Knobler, P. (1994). *All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President*. New York: Random House.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Let's Fly This Flag* (1943) | FRAME gallery, [Let's Fly This Flag: Everybody at Least 10 Percent in War Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/lets-fly-this-flag-1943/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| Reagan receives the Tower Commission report (26 February 1987) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_President_Reagan_receiving_the_Tower_Commission_Report_in_the_Cabinet_Room_-_NARA_-_198581.jpg); NARA 198581 | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| Reagan signs the U.S.–Canada Free Trade Agreement (2 January 1988) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Ronald_Reagan_Signing_United_States_-_Canada_Free_Trade_Agreement_at_The_Sunnylands_Annenberg_Estate_in_Rancho_Mirage_California_-_DPLA_-_d1650e5d7b17879e4467e199c2a62d2e.jpg); NARA via DPLA | Public domain (U.S. government work) |

### Image gaps

Photographs of the 1992 Clinton campaign headquarters sign and of the flag and money priming studies' materials were not found in open collections, so they are cited, not hosted.

## Techniques

[Flooding the zone](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/flooding-the-zone/)

## Related

- [Framing effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/framing-effect/)
- [Availability heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/availability-heuristic/)
- [Anchoring](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/anchoring/)
- [Illusory truth effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/illusory-truth-effect/)
- [Flooding the zone](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/flooding-the-zone/)
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/)