Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
more rules are not always better. Each situation probably has its own
optimal level of regulations.
9.7 CORPORATE SAFETY PROGRAMS BASED ON PRIMING
Apart from safety buddies, team interventions, and management actions,
an organization can also influence safety behavior via general communica-
tion and specific assignments for all employees. For this purpose, we intro-
duce the technique of priming. Although priming is still hardly applied in
organizational development, it has established an important place among
the techniques of recent psychological research. Priming works completely
nonconsciously and can be defined as a form of influencing behavior by
exposing the brain to stimuli that are strongly connected to a stereotype or
a certain stimulus. Priming effects can be observed at almost all stages of
cognitive processing (Bargh, 2001; 2006; Dijksterhuis, 2005, Naccache &
Dehaene, 2001).
A first impression about priming is given by a research from Bargh in
1996 (Dijksterhuis, 2007). He invited people for a whole morning of
psychological tests. Test 1 was introduced as a language test and consisted
of filling in a crossword puzzle. One group received a puzzle with words
that all related to elderly people (
retired, pension, Florida, relaxed,
grandchildren
, etc.). The other group received the same puzzle but with
words that related to young people (
diploma, ambition, career, New York,
first salary
, etc.). After they had finished the puzzle they were asked to go
to another room, five floors lower, for a second test. The time between
leaving the first room and entering the second room was clocked via a
laser beam on both doors. The members of the subgroup who had been
confronted with words connected to elderly people took significantly
more time to bridge the distance between the both rooms, compared to
the subgroup that had been given puzzles with words about young people.
When checked later, neither of the groups had noticed that all the words
in the puzzle were related to a certain topic.
This experiment shows the essence of priming. When one is pre-
sented with a strong stereotype, this has a nonconscious influence on
the way we perform our behavior. The modern brain has a free work-
ing memory that can be filled with information for a certain task.
Information has to be gathered from storage rooms that are spread
over the brain, and it uses search engines to reduce the number of
