This phenomenon is particularly important for psychology, sociology and other social science studies, though it can also sometimes be relevant in nutrition studies and some that use functional MRIs. Priming refers to how a study participant’s response to one stimulus affects their response to a subsequent stimulus. It relates to how individuals make automatic associations between different concepts based on their experiences, biases, etc.
Deeper dive
In some cases, an experiment may wish to intentionally prime people, such as studies on stereotype threat. Stereotype threat refers to the findings that members of a commonly stereotyped group perform more poorly on a task when they’re reminded just before the task of the stereotype that they won’t do well; meanwhile, other members of their group do not perform more poorly than average when not primed with the stereotype ahead of time. (For example, telling a group of women that women are poorer at math leads those women to get a lower score on a math test than when they take a similar test at another time without a reminder of the stereotype.)
Other times, researchers may need to avoid inadvertent priming to ensure they do not introduce bias into their experiment. Whenever covering social science studies, and occasionally nutrition studies, journalists should consider whether priming might be involved in the experiment and whether it was intentional or accounted for, depending on the experiment design. Several different types of priming exist. Interestingly, research has suggested that priming can be a concern not only for study participants but also for the researchers.