To prime means to prepare or to make ready, as in painting, to apply a prep coat. Priming also has a special application in psychology: influencing a person’s next perceptions by saying or doing something (stimulus) that shapes a context for meaning. If I have mixed results on my report card, for example, I may lead with the B+ in Biology before I mention the D in math. So, too, consumers of information are primed to hear good news, bad news, and sales pitches.
Advertising helps us understand that we are hungry, or thirsty, or out of style by creating a sense of need. Primers know that people use mental information that is most immediately (or recently) available to make decisions. Anne-Katrin Arnold has an interesting blog post on the subject of priming----and her blog itself offers another example of priming if you take into account how the attractive photographs and charts bring a sense of control and calm to the turbulent subjects she is discussing; for example, “Climate Change News.”
Why does this matter to an educated person? Organizations invest heavily in priming for persuasion’s sake. Most of our political candidates strive to control the context of our voting behavior. To develop an artful understanding of media and presentations of issues, we need to be able to observe and interpret complicated juxtapositions of information. But our goal as educated citizens should be to exceed interpretation and to be able to act in the interest of our society.
John F. Kennedy described it so precisely in his address to Vanderbilt University. As I reread his words at American Rhetoric, the online speechbank, I felt a bit ashamed by the condition of our educational system and the merely expedient purposes it so often serves now. First, disdaining mere economic advantage, Kennedy paints a clear picture of the responsibilities and value of an educated citizen:
“Of the many special obligations incumbent upon an educated citizen, I would cite three as outstanding: Your obligation to the pursuit of learning; your obligation to serve the public; your obligation to uphold the law. If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all.”
Kennedy’s elegant defense of the profession is crushingly relevant in our own time:
"For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics … see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing."
Last, he clarifies the profound social stakes of allowing citizens to languish in ignorance:
"But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that knowledge is power -- more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people; that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all; and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, ‘enlighten the people generally,’ tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
How far have we drifted from that perception of the value of a teacher and a student? If we pit the taxpayer against the teacher, we are priming people to resent fellow citizens who also pay taxes. How does that help us to focus on the real problem? We agree to scapegoat easy targets because of semantic priming. If we stopped to think about the arguments, we would realize how foolishly constructed they are.
Maybe it’s time for the user mentality to take a break. As the economic disparities deepen in our society, we are going to need some highly educated people to lead us back to a more humane purpose, to use the right to vote to vote for the right things. Our future prosperity depends on it.
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