Real Modern Man

In these days I'm reading a very interesting book: Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. He doesn't talk about relationships and relations specifically, even if there is a chapter devoted to a very effective psychological test of few minutes, able to predict whether a couple is doomed to have a succesfull LTR or otherwise if it will fail miserably. It has even a paragraph about speed-dating psychological dynamics.
However it's not a seduction manual, so if you're not interested in divulgative psychology, there's no interest in reading it.

Here I'd like to talk about some experiments I read in that book regarding the power of language. Experiments able to clarify language's effectiveness in triggering emotions and automatic unconscious responses. In other words it's the empirical confirmation of the hypnotic talk Franco was talking about in this site, and interesting too for all those concerned with NLP.

Studies started with a Yale University research conducted by Prof. John Bargh.
John Bargh wanted to study unconscious and automatic ways in which our social environment causes us to think, feel and behave. This plays a very important role in "stereotyping and prejudice, social behaviour such as aggression, cooperation, achievement, and also our immediate liking or diliking of people, places, and things". It's self evident how this reaserch is connected to our field of interest.

The first experiment:

Imagine that I'm a professor, and I've asked you to come and see me in my office. You walk down a long corridor, come through the doorway, and sit down at a table. In front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five-words sets. I want you to make a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as possible out of each set. It's called a scrambled-sentence test. Ready ?

01. him was worried she always
02. from are Florida oranges temperature
03. ball the throw toss silently
04. shoes give replace old the
05. he observes occasionally people watches
06. be will sweat lonely they
07. sky the seamless gray is
08. should now withdraw forgetful we
09. us bingo sit play let
10. sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins

That seemed straightforward, right ? Actually, it wasn't.
After you finished that test - believe it or not (this is experimentally proved) - you would have walked out of my office and back down the hall more slowly than you walked in. With that test, I affected the way you behaved. How ? Well, look back at the list.
Scattered throughout it are certain words, such as "worried", "Florida", "old", "lonely", "gray", "bingo", and "wrinkle". You thought I was just making you take a language test. But, in fact, what I was also doing was making the big computer in your brain - your adaptive unconcious - think about the state of being old. It didn't inform the rest of your brain about its sudden obsession. But your brain took all this talk of old age so seriously that by the time you finished and walked down the corridor, you acted old. You walked slowly. John Bargh called this experiment a "Priming experiment".

In another experiment Bargh used a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave everyone in the group one of two scrambled-sentence test. The first was sprinkled with words like "aggressively", "bold", "rude", "bother", "disturb", and "infringe". The second was sprinkled with words like "respect", "considerate", "appreciate", "patiently", "yield", "polite", and "courteous".
In neither case were there so many similar words that the students picked up on what was going on (once you become conscious of being primed, of course, the priming doesn't work). After doing the test - which takes only about five minutes - the students were instructed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment in order to get their next assignment.
But whenever a student arrived at the office, however, Bargh made sure that the experimenter was busy, locked in conversation with someone else - a confederate who was standing in the hallway, blocking the doorway to the experimenter's office. Bargh wanted to learn whether the people who were primed with the polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation between the experimenter and the confederate than those primed with the rude words. He thought there would have been a difference but that it would have been slight. He was wrong. The difference was astonishing ! The people primed to be rude eventually interrupted - on average about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all . If the experiment hadn't ended after 10 minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces ?

Powerful, isnt' it ?

To me this has three consequences:

1) We have to think of it when we talk with a chick. Have our homework done (canned materials rich of good and positively emotionally charged content). Just immediately after having met her;

2) We've to remember that once one becomes conscious of being primed, of course, the priming doesn't work. This has a twofold consequence. The first is: Beware of her words ! When she's talking of something with a bad content (past boyfriend or any BS), notice it and change conversation. She could influence you, not only herself.

3) The second consequence is to be aware of what is conditioning our life even outside of the dating environment. Negative words by friends, parents, kinsmen, collegues, etc. We've start to notice other people language. It's not necessary to run away or exile our pals and beloveds . Priming doesn't work if we are aware of it. It suffices to attentively hear their language and its possible consequences will be avoided.

To me these experiments were utterly fascinating.