Cognitive priming

• What is cognitive priming?

  Activation of existing thoughts and feelings (schemata)
• Repeated experience of aggressive media can provide a script about how violent situations may play out
• Huesmann (1998) argues that this script is stored in memory so we become primed to become aggressive
• This is an automatic process

  • becuase a script can direct our behaviour without us being aware
• The script is triggered when we encounter cues in a situation we perceive as aggresive
• Fischer and Greitemeyer (2006)

  • male participants heard songs featuring aggressively derogatory lyrics about women
  • Compared with when they listen to neutral lyrics, participants later recalled more negative qualities about women and behaved more aggressively towards a female confederate
  • Similar results with female participants and men hating lyrics
• Real-world application- A03


  Real-world violent situations depend on interpretation of environmental cues, which depends on cognitive scripts stored in memory.

  Bushman and Anderson (2002)

  • claim someone who watches violent media store aggresive scripts more readily, so they interpret cues as aggressive

  Suggests that interventions could potentially reduce aggressive behavioyr by challenging hostile cognitive biases
• Confounding variables- A03

  Violemt video games tend to be more complex in gameplay than non-violent games

  • so complexity is a confounding variable
  • complexity rather than violence may have a priming effect

  Zendle et al. (2018)

  • found that when complexity was controlled, the priming effects of violent video games disappeared

  So, supportive findings of studies into priming may be partly due to confounding variables