Priming and the Brain: a Case of Unexpected Reverse Priming with a Prologue On the Paradox of Free Will
Previous studies have found that priming participants for the goal to achieve leads them to perform better in a task, such as a word-search puzzle, than control participants. The current study investigated the effects of priming participants for the goal to achieve, the effects of priming participants for the goal to give up, and effects of priming for the goal to achieve and give up simultaneously. We measured differences in behavior and brain activity between these conditions. Our results indicate that, contrary to what we had predicted, priming participants for the goal to achieve leads them to find fewer words in a word-search task than control participants; this is true even when the giving-up prime is present simultaneously. On the other hand, priming participants to give up has no significant effect on the number of words found. Similar results were observed in terms of the amount of time the participants spent working on the puzzles. We also found that neither priming for achievement nor priming to give up has a significant main effect on brain activity, but a significant interaction was observed. We concluded that it is possible that the environmental conditions in which the participants were tested, which may have motivated them to protect their self-worth, priming participants for the goal to achieve has a reverse behavioral priming effect.