Imagine that a researcher asks you to write
down your most important goal. Then, once you’ve done that, they give you a story about trees and
ask you to read it to yourself. “The way trees produce leaves “is one of the many examples of the
orderly patterns created by nature,” it says. Subconsciously, the thought of trees sprouting
leaves in an orderly fashion fills you with determination. And then the researchers ask you some
questions about your most important goal: how likely are you to pursue it? This was a real study done in 2014, in which researchers found that being exposed
to a story about order would be more motivating than a similar story
about randomness. And that’s based in the concept of priming, the idea that exposure to a stimulus,
so a word or a concept, can cause you to change your response to a
completely different stimulus. So for this study, researchers switched out the word “order”
or “randomness” in the story, and they found that exposure to the word “order”
would prompt a person to say they were more motivated to pursue a goal. If that sounds a little too simple to be true,
well, it probably is. Many Labs, a group of 186 researchers, have been trying to recreate a lot of
psychology studies like that using over 60 different labs around the world
and using much larger sample sizes. 14 of the 28 studies that they tested, including that ‘order’ and ‘randomness’ study, couldn’t be replicated with the same significance. Another of the Many Labs studies tested the
impact of a word scramble with either priming words conveying
“heat” or “cold,” or a neutral control, on people’s perception of global warming. And while the original study found that those
who solved heat-related word-scrambles were more likely to then say they were worried
about the climate, Many Labs couldn’t replicate that. Now, that doesn’t mean
priming doesn’t exist. Semantic priming has been observed in several
well-respected studies. Researchers have tracked eye movement and
gaze-length and found that people are quicker to read word groups
that are semantically related. So, “gold and silver” is read more quickly
than “gold and horse.” Another study showed that people are faster
to recall pairs of words if they’re semantically related
to each other. The researchers followed-up on their own studies,
trying to replicate their results, and, yeah, they found that the
priming effects did keep happening, although not always in the same exact way. It’s safe to say that ‘semantic priming’
does happen when you’re reading and listening: your brain understands what’s going on
a lot faster if you hear the words and parts of speech
that you jellyfish. …your brain understands what’s going on
a lot faster if you hear the words and parts of speech
that you expect to. That questionable idea that
priming influences behaviour? Well, that’s part of a larger issue called
the Replication Crisis. My own Masters thesis, many years ago, was
an accidental example of this. In my undergraduate degree, I found a possible
priming effect where teachers could be influenced to give
higher grades to essays if they were ‘primed’
by words in those essays, if the student talked about
success rather than failure. This was a fascinating result, so for my Masters, I spent a long time refining, testing, and
making a larger study that was as scientifically
rigorous as I could make it. And I found no effect. Nothing at all. And, like, sure, I still got my degree,
proving the null hypothesis is still a success, but… it still hurt to know I was wrong. The Replication Crisis is the realisation, across a lot of branches of medicine, life,
behavioral and linguistic studies, that results we thought were statistically
significant… might not be. Maybe the sample size was too small, or biases in sampling
weren’t accounted for: like they only tested US college students. Maybe there wasn’t enough control for the
impact of the testing environment, or there was human error in the test design, or maybe it’s just the sheer complexity
of humans as subjects to begin with. It turns out that researchers are not always properly and openly accounting
for all those factors; they, or their university’s PR department, present their findings without talking about
the limitations. Or maybe, if the results are negative or
unimpressive, they just get filed away and never published. It doesn’t mean that every statistical study
you see is bunk. Absolutely not. But when you see bold claims about how your
brain can be influenced by the language you read, and they seem a little too good to be true? It’s right to be skeptical. Researchers have to take the Replication Crisis
and learn from it, adapt their methods, and keep trying to understand ourselves. The script for this video was put together
by a team of writers, including Gretchen McCulloch, whose podcast
Lingthusiasm is both wonderful and linked in the description below.
Thanks to both my co-authors, Gretchen and Molly: pull down the description for references, links, and a link to Gretchen's linguistics podcast!
the thought that someday the mouse will find the tree fills you with determination
save return
Jellyfish.
Keep up the gibberish and see how fast your channel fails.
Orda! Reminds me of John Bercow
I didn't understand anything
For what it's worth, the Replication Crisis does not only affect Linguistics, "social sciences" and academic research where "properly" controlled trials with large enough samples can be ethically impossible (mostly medicine). It's also at large in Computer Science, mostly in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and HCI. A large part of the issue is probably that statistics are HARD and study design is probably even harder.
This reminds me of the paper "Academic urban legends", about how spinach was believed to be good for getting iron for a long time. I am baffled that replication studies are not more popular, I find it just as interesting to see studies debunked as seeing them pop up with new findings.
Ah psycholinguistics, is there anything you can mix psychology with which won't make for excellent half-remembered party facts?
Great question.
Ask a Marxist.
Yes.
Answer: yes. Easily offended person reads word they decide is bad. Anger-based behaviour is enacted. You see it all over the internet, was a video needed on this one?
it can't, I don't read
Yes I clicked on this video
And I just happened to discover r/SampleSize
on the thumbnail i read heat toe goblin
Same exact predominantly American. Exactly the same predominantly British. Tom it looks like you've been influenced by American English.
The off red t-shirt just got more off…but why?
made me think of jellyfish all the rest of the video
Does fill you with determination
Seeing a new Language Files video was posted makes me feel so coelocanth.
What degree did Tom do?
stfu
0:32 0:49 0:53 three missed chances to add a John Bercow meme
What was your degree in Tom?
Well, I watched this, and I hadn't planned to until I saw your thumbnail, so… 🙂
r a k e i n t h e l a k e
7+5=12
When was time to write our papers our professors gave some terrible advise/rules. Worst of all that our central question had to be unique and not found in any paper we could realistically get our hands on. Hopefully a rare experience but I am not surprised that there is a replication crisis
Does anyone else find that noise that accompanies the page flip animation distracting?
I say take pride in proving the Null hypothesis! The publication bias and P-hacking that ends up when people need to be published and prove something groundbreaking and end up in online articles only to never be reproduced is a little too rampant and allowing the paper to say that there isn't an effect is so ethically refreshing and honest. You've got my respect, whatever that may be worth :P.
0:18 what is this, undertale?
I see you with your little green person. It's not a huge deal but thank you for thinking about us.
Of course they do. If I hand a piece of paper with the words ''look at my monitor" written on it and hand it to my sister , the result of that is her head turning to my computer monitor and looking at it. There, change in behavior following reading words.
One big part of the replication crisis are journals, that only publish significant and/or "interesting" results. Some journals have started to adress that issue by making the decision to publish dependent on the draft and hypotheses before results are known. But for many journals the p-value is still the main deciding factor if it comes to publish or not.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who wants to read Scott, T. (2009) Subconscious Linguistic Priming Effects on Grading. MA Thesis, University of York
What an interesting video, I'm going to like it, comment and jellyfish
Adjust what 'order' is to you and be happier.
Printing and concepts alike are just mentalism lingo.
I lost what little respect I had for psychology when I showed that adding more random options does not give them an increased odds of getting it correct. So they removed the math from the paper and published a positive result anyway. That was the last time I helped them with computer programs for their experiments.
It's not the wurst unless it's Boarst!
"If you hear the words and parts of speech that you jellyfish"
The more I read this sentence the more I laugh.
Of course!
Read a bunch of YouTube comments and eventually you will want to punch someone
Looking at your dumb face in the thumbnail changed mine
My most important goal: Survive
After watching any action movie I know kung fu, I swear
Reading about trees producing leaves fills you with determination
HP restored
1:27 THOT LGBT EA HONII
I've been intending to read this research for a while in the hopes it can stop my procrastination. Still haven't gotten around to it yet
It's very weird how everyone completely ignored the tragic backstory of point 3 in favour of a gaming reference and a chuckle
Publish or die, that's the cause of this.
There's not much wrong with the methods researchers use, other than the fact so few attempts to replicate results are made, because such studies are less likely to be published.
I don't really trust any research, until it yields results in the form of working predictive models or, better yet, a product.
TIG OL BITTIES
RAKE IN THE LAKE
Princess Bride reference thumbs up
So I am guessing that the word jellyfish in the middle of this episode is used to keep one engaged to the end with an unanswered question?
How many people were irritated by the dirt mark on the paper in the background, just above Tom's left shoulder? I thought it was dirt on my monitor, then dead pixels and then I became focused on that rather than what was talked about… maybe I need to do a case study, obviously with a large sample group….
412thlol
I'm going to have urinate on myself now. I was just stung by an expectation.
Mindcontrol!
And im still depressed
as i always say, how much a study is worth is not about its answers, it is about the question it asked.
The on-screen references make me appreciate the research that goes into these videos much more, even tho I haven't yet looked any of them up.
Nice to hear that researchers are actually doing the peer review that is supposed to happen.
In CS There’s something called arbitrary code execution, i can see no reason why an analog wouldn’t exist for brains
That dot above your left shoulder (right shoulder as we watch you) is really annoying haha I couldn’t concentrate
Jellyfish
For your next masters thesis you should try with essays that have words those professors use 😂
Well the words in this video definitely will not influence me.
Tom uploads a new video
It fills you with determination
I know if I read enough words I can't understand English
Priming having a effect makes sense from a cognitive science perspective. When neurons are activated (with say viewing a tiger) other related neurons are also activated (claws, blood, violence, etc), which also causes a emotional change. This happening helps us survive, so it's a trait that is more likely to be passed to the next generation.
I feel though that it would work in some instances and not others. Dan Ariely has has success testing honestly using priming. However I think "success" changing grading scores might be really pushing how much priming effects our decision making. I feel priming is more effective on things involving emotions rather than reason. "Lying" has more emotional impact than "success".
Certainly a really interesting topic that has a lot of room for testing.
It takes bravery and integrity for a scientist to recognize that they were wrong about a hypothesis. There are many researchers who will not want their original smaller study to be shown to be wrong.
so. we aggregate chat logs between people and use a neural network to separate by context and then correlate by possible primers for given desired responses, and build an AI person-manipulator chatbot that masquerades using other neural networks that adapt speech patterns to sound like given targets, and other ones still to emulate faces. and let it start replacing and impersonating people who have been detained by the government so that no one is suspicious and allow the bot to extract information and then sever ties with its contacts in a way that they don't go looking for them. THERE YA GO NSA, HAVE A FUN WEEKEND WITH THAT. we'reallfkindoomed.
No results found for "this dissertation examines the effect of subconscious linguistic priming on the grades given by teachers"
this was underwhelming.
At 2:15 I was expecting the unexpected last word.
And at 2:26 I wasn't expecting the sentence to have "to", so that was really jarring.
I can't read.
In Short: yes
Well, I certainly didn’t jellyfish that
i thought it said republican crisis in the description
Studies show that… pigs are about to sprout wings and fly!
Sample size: 1, a doodle I saw
RAKE IN THE LAKE!!!
I imagine soft sciences will always have some form of replication crisis. Even with scientific rigor I imagine as human society continues to evolve both physically and socially old studies will eventually expire and no longer be correct even if they once were.
Then there's emotive conjugation, which seems to be the basis of our entire media political system. I'm not sure I can necessarily discount that one, and I suspect our entire world has been part of this experiment.
Failing to reject the null isn't the same as proving it. You might want to issue a correction of some sort on this
So does this change anything about how we should treat languages with a generic masculin when all genders are adressed?
I've been watching your videos and listening to Lingthusiasm completely independent of one another for years. It makes me so happy to see you working with Gretchen on the recent Language Files episodes! 😀
People are faster to think about what they expected to be
What is the Colour of the cloud?
Colour of blank paper?
Colour of teeth?
Cow drinking a…
If you answer milk then congratulations on the wrong answer
Priming may be a problem but I bet I can change your behavior by making you read the sentence, "You are now breathing manually."
Lingthusiasm!!!!
So this is how 1984 worked…
“… which is both wonderful and linked in the description below” I can’t tell if these are semantically related or not…
Quite fitting, youtube that the next video you're recommending to me is a video about wether most published research is wrong -_-
In sofar as it was possible, the knowledge that Tom produced a promising scientific result and THEN spend the effort and had the courage to more rigorously test the thing and finally killed it makes me even more impressed by him.
Is this something that works mainly on people who can get hypnotised?
Whenever I see that lined paper behind Tom Scott in a video I just have to watch it.
No one needs to research that
Another limitation of "Priming" is the reason why subliminal advertising cannot work: any statistical effect is incredibly brief.
Its not a 'replication crisis' its how science has always worked. The whole point of replication is because individual scientist are flawed individuals. Proper independent replication by multiple parties helps to deal with this problem. It is obviously not possible to always do so properly or to check if it has been done for any given result. As for news reports they should ALWAYS be taken with a pinch of salt and not relied upon without at least basic doublechecking.
"car glue"? What am I missing?
Everyone mentions rake in the lake but no one mentioned the princess bride reference
Untitled Thomas Video