Priming

One day, a professor asked his student to his office. The student walked down a long corridor, came through the doorway, and met his professor.

"Look, this is a scrambled-sentence test. You can find a list of five-word sets in front of you. Your task is to resemble a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as you can out of each set."

"Yes sir," the student's face lit up at the examination paper. "This is easy."

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 sing play let
10  sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins

After a while the student finished the test like a piece of cake. He said goodbye to the professor, satisfied. It had never dawned on him that he walked out of the office and down the hall much more slowly than the way he walked in few minutes ago.

How so? That was hardly a difficult test, it seems, that could have made the student tired or frustrated to walk at such a slow pace. So it is perhaps surprising to find the same aftermath - slow pace - when the test was repeated in other students. Nobody could get the energy to walk fast. Ever. It was like falling down Alice's rabbit hole. One simply got weird and slow after the scrambled-sentence test.

Yes, it is possible, and the odds can be calculated quite precisely, according to the psychologist John Bargh, when you take a closer look at the words. See? Words like "worried," "old," "lonely," "gray," and "wrinkle" are scattered all around to prime our brains about being old. The exercise, as it turns out, is never meant to be a language test. The unconscious exposure to the priming words simply make one act old and become slow. Easy enough.