When I heard about Priming I couldn’t really believe it. In 1996 John Bargh did an experiment involving participants unscrambling lists of words. One list had words relating to old age and the other had words relating to youth. When the people were done unscrambling the words, those who had unscrambled words related to old age walked more slowly than those who unscrambled words related to youth. Though the people didn’t know it, they had been subconsciously primed to behave in a certain way.

This week in Cambridge there have been interviews. Some 600 people apply for around 150 places in my college, Jesus, and after helping out for a few days I realised that most of them are, unsurprisingly, very nervous. Because of this, I thought that I might be able to use the concept of priming to sub consciously calm them down. I created a series of posters to put around the area where they wait- using a great free font from the Leauge of Movable Type: League Gothic. On the posters I printed the words “calm,” “relax,” and “smile”. These words are more aggressive than those usually used in priming because I thought that this would mean that they would be more immediately memorable especially among the other posters in the room. As people who are more relaxed and less nervous usually perform better, I hope that my priming project had some effect on the Jesus interview candidates!