Drawing on recent research, a study carried out by Harris et al. (2009) demonstrated that priming through food advertisements led to an increase in eating behaviour of both children and adults. In their first study where children were the only participants, one half watched a cartoon in TV with four 30-s food commercials promoting junk snacks and breakfast foods containing a happy message inserted during two designated advertising breaks. The other half, however, watched the same cartoon with four commercials promoting entertainment products instead. All participants received a large bowl of cheddar cheese and were told they could have snacks while watching cartoon. When all participants left, the experimenter weighed the remaining crackers and recorded the amount consumed. Results showed that children who saw the cartoon with food advertising ate 8.8g more, which equals to 45% more cheddar cheese crackers than the control group while watching TV.
In their second experiment, university students were first asked to watch a 16-minute shortened version of an improvisational comedy TV program, which included 11 commercials lasting 4 minutes in total during two advertising breaks. All groups watched seven of the same non-food commercials; one group watched a version with four more commercials for food and beverages containing a snacking message that emphasized fun; another group watched a version including four food and beverage commercials with a nutrition message. The control group watched the version with four non-food commercials instead that were inserted in positions that were neither the first nor the last during the commercial break. Results showed that participants who saw snack ads ate significantly more than the control group and the group that saw nutrition ads. In terms of eating time, the group that saw snack ads ate for the longest compared with both the control group and the group seeing nutrition ads. In both studies, participants were unaware of the true nature of the research. The second study, however, faced limits in terms of how possibly other moderating effects such as eating with others or eating at other times designated might have affected the results. Nevertheless, these studies in overall could fairly suggest that there the link between perception and behaviour is automatic and thus did not make previous research seem naive.
Study by Harris et al. (2009) had practical implications. Watching snacks adverts on a daily basis is very likely to greatly increase consumption of all foods, which potentially leads to health issues like obesity and heart disease. To alleviate the situation, the media would definitely have a large role to play – they should closely monitor the food advertisements so that the general public is less exposed to them and ultimately lead healthier lives.
Considering research investigating priming effects on behaviour, there were some supporting the ideo-motor action notion. Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (2000) demonstrated how activation of the politician stereotype influenced behaviour. In an experiment, they used a scrambled sentence procedure to activate the politician stereotype for half of their participants, where they had established that politicians are associated with being longwinded in their earlier work. Participants were then asked to write an essay where they argued against the French nuclear testing program in the Pacific. Results met predictions that participants primed with stimuli related to politician wrote essays that were considerably longer than the control group. Participants were unaware of how the former task influenced the latter one.
Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2000) obtained evidence showing that priming participants with names of animals could affect motor behaviour. In their study, participants were primed with speedy animals like cheetah or with slower animals like snail. Subsequently, participants were instructed to pick up a questionnaire in a neighbouring room. Results revealed that participants primed with speedy animals collected the questionnaire significantly quicker than those primed with slow animals. This study was again a strong evidence that perception-behaviour link may not be naïve and that humans are capable of imitating animal behaviour.
Research that suggested different factors to inhibit the link between social perception and social behaviour provided a more comprehensive perspective of the link. One of them is how frequent contact one has had with others. Dijksterhuis, et al. (2000) conducted an experiment to assess how much contact college-age experimental participants had per week with the elderly. It was shown that the experimental group which had more frequent contact with the elderly developed higher associative strength between poor memory and the elderly stereoly, thus showed relatively poorer memory. Putting into a practical context, this finding can possibly explain why teenagers whom often get along with bullies eventually become bullies. By not getting in contact with aggressive groups, we could develop better relationships with friends and family members.
Secondly, presence of features of the external environment and perceiver goals of individuals could potentially moderate the behaviour to be elicited by stereotypic activation after priming. (Macrae & Johnston, 1999) In a study conducted by Macrae & Johnston (1999), half of the participants were primed with the trait “helpfulness” through a scrambled sentence task while another half were not; half of the participants were told that everything was on time while another half were told that time was running short. Results demonstrated that both primed and non-primed participants who were told that they were running out of time did not help the experimenter pick up the leaking pens when he accidentally dropped it. The leaking pens acted as a disincentive - they cause dirt. Using the same logic, in academic context, priming one with ‘lazy’ to a group that are told that a subsequent knowledge test takes place after a day should ultimately be lazier than a group which is told that the test takes place after an hour instead because the former would worry less about the results.
Moreover, whether assimilation or contrast effect occurs could also affect the behavioural outcome of perception. (Dijksterhuis, et al., 1998) Assimilation effect occurs when the priming construct constitutes a matching behaviour, say priming ‘professor’ should lead to better scores in a test; contrast effect occurs when the priming construct constitutes an opposite behaviour instead, for instance priming ‘Queen of Dutch’ would lead one to walk faster.
In the first study of Dijksterhuis, et al. (1998), first half of participants were primed with either a highly intelligent stereotype – professor or a not so intelligent one – supermodels by imagination and list their behaviours. Another half were primed with exemplars from both categories – Albert Einstein for the highly intelligent category and Claudia Schiffer for the supermodel category. Afterwards, all participants were asked to complete a questionnaire containing general knowledge questions. Importantly, no participants believed that the priming task had an effect on the completing the general knowledge questions. Results revealed that participants primed with Einstein performed worse than those primed with Schiffer, demonstrating a contrast effect through exemplar priming. Compared with participants primed with supermodels, those primed with professors had performed better, illustrating an assimilation effect through stereotype priming. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues argued that contrast effect arose due to the fact that participants involved in a self-comparison with the exemplar, and it has to be an extreme one to elicit the effect.
Their second study comprised of three conditions - neutral prime followed by neutral judgment task, elderly prime followed by elderly exemplar and elderly prime followed by neutral judgment task. The elderly exemplar task consisted of a short questionnaire about Princess Juliana whereas in the neutral judgment task participants were introduced that it was concerned with their perception of Benelux countries. Again, no participants were aware of the possible connections between the first and second studies. Results showed that participants in the elderly prime-exemplar judgment condition walked faster than both the ones in neutral prime-neutral judgment condition and those in the elderly prime-neutral judgment condition. These studies demonstrated that different effects could lead to different behaviours, thus capable of moderating the perception-behaviour link.
Finally, dislike towards another person could affect our tendency to mimic others unconsciously. McHugo et al. (1985) conducted a study by showing participants a videotape of former American President Ronald Regan, where he clearly expressed happiness and anger at different times during a news conference. It was shown that democrats did not share the mood of Ronald Reagan while Republicans did share his mood both when he was happy and angry. This suggested disliking another person could potentially inhibit our behaviour of mimicking others’ moods, which also showed that earlier research might be naive. In a practical context, this can really affect results of presidential elections of different countries.
In conclusion, it appears that there is no definite stance to solve the issues addressed. Some evidence showed that the perception-behaviour link was not inevitable and hence was naïve, for instance assimilation and contrast effects, perceiver goals and environmental cues, etc. However, there was also evidence that strongly demonstrated the automaticity of the link. Automaticity of the link between perception and behaviour could have profound implications on human behaviour, for instance it would determine whether humans will be capable of restraining discrimination, adhering to good groups of people, monitor their eating behaviour and avoid disincentives. To further advance knowledge about the perception-behaviour link, it is suggested that further research on the perception-behaviour link may investigate whether education level and ethnic groups would have a moderating role in the perception-behaviour link as it is reasonable to deduce that those in higher education levels are more likely to restrain their behaviour and different ethnic groups may have different cultural norms.
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