Thinking with Your Nose, Ears, Eyes, and Hands: Priming and the Subconscious Mind

Written By Kristopher Wood

In 1997, a small British wine shop became an unwitting laboratory of the subconscious. On alternating days, the shopkeeper piped in French accordion music or German beer-hall songs as customers browsed the shelves. The bottles and prices stayed the same, but sales did not. When the air was filled with Edith Piaf and French chanson, French wines flew off the shelves at five times the rate of German vintages; when lively German folk music played, customers reached for German Rieslings over French Bordeaux by about two to one. At the end of their shopping, patrons cheerfully explained their choices in terms of taste or habit. Hardly anyone mentioned the music. In fact, when asked directly, most insisted the background tunes hadn’t influenced them at all. And yet the numbers told a different story. The melody had managed to tip the balance of their decisions without anyone realizing it.

Psychologists use the term priming for this phenomenon: subtle cues that influence our thoughts and behavior without our conscious awareness. Our behaviour can be tweaked by fleeting exposure to words, smells, sounds, and sights that we don’t actively notice and can’t later recall. In the wine shop, the music activated something in the customers’ minds, perhaps national stereotypes or fond memories, nudging them toward a matching wine. Crucially, this happened below the level of conscious choice. The customers weren’t buying Bordeaux because they recognized La Marseillaise on the speakers; they were entirely oblivious to the effect. Priming is by nature covert. It works like a hidden hand on a scale, tilting the outcome while we merrily go along believing we’re choosing freely (for a deeper dive down the rabbit hole of freedom philosophy, see Erich Fromm’s book “Escape From Freedom”).

This subtle influence is not limited to music or wine. Consider what happens when a hint of citrus scent lingers in a room. In one experiment, researchers eleased the scent of an all-purpose cleaner in a test room where people were eating crumbly biscuits. The result: those in the scented room ended up keeping their table significantly cleaner, picking up crumbs and wiping surfaces more often than participants in an unscented room. The mere smell of “clean,” it turned out, put cleaning on their minds and into their actions. When later questioned, the participants had no idea that a scent had anything to do with their tidy behavior. In fact, checks confirmed they hadn’t even consciously noticed the lemony cleaner smell. A simple, seemingly unnoticed, odor was enough to shift how people behaved, silently whispering to their subconscious, “tidy up, you doorknob.” (yes, I’m picturing Liam Gallagher for the subconscious voice in the Pixar film of the experiment)

Visual cues can have an equally uncanny power. In a university coffee room, researchers placed a poster above the honesty box where staff paid for tea and milk. Some weeks the poster showed a pair of stern, watching eyes; other weeks, it showed a benign image of flowers. Nothing else was different. Yet on the “eyes” weeks, contributions to the honesty box nearly tripled compared to the weeks with the flower poster. No one was explicitly told to pay more, but the feeling of being watched, even by a flat image on paper, triggered an instinct to behave honestly. Here again, few if any of the coffee drinkers could have articulated why they decided to drop a bit more coin in the box. The gaze they sensed on the wall never rose to the level of conscious importance, but, like Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, it worked its influence nonetheless.

Even our sense of touch is not immune to these nudges. A study at Yale University found that people’s social judgments could be swayed by something as simple as the temperature of the drink in their hand. In the experiment, participants held a cup of coffee for a brief moment before meeting a stranger. Those who happened to hold a warm cup of coffee tended to later describe the stranger as warmer in personality (kinder, more generous) than those who had held an iced coffee. The participants would have laughed if you told them the coffee made them see someone as friendly, yet that is exactly what happened. Physical warmth translated into emotional warmth via an unconscious association, priming people to perceive friendliness without their awareness. Our brains, it seems, are constantly drawing connections between sensory experiences and abstract feelings, and these connections continually guide us in hidden ways.

The notion that unseen influences might sway our choices has long captivated and unnerved observers of human behavior. In the 1950s, at the dawn of modern advertising psychology, a market researcher named James Vicary claimed he could boost concession sales in a movie theater by flashing subliminal messages like “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat Popcorn” for a split second on the screen. These claims caused a popular sensation (the public began imagining mind-control ads lurking in every commercial) but Vicary’s study was a fraud, and he eventually admitted he had faked the whole thing. For a while, “subliminal advertising” was dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. Yet, in a twist worthy of a Sherlock Holmes, decades later psychologists began finding that ordinary sights and sounds, not hidden single-frame messages, DO have subtle effects on us after all. The difference is that these real primes are often perfectly visible or audible (a song, a scent, an image) but they blend into the background of life, engaging our minds outside of conscious focus. What Vicary fabricated in secret has, in a sense, become commonplace truth in scientific research: we are all susceptible to gentle, unseen persuasion by the atmosphere around us.

For professionals in marketing and behavior design, such findings represent an opportunity; a chance to influence behavior in ways traditional marketing might miss. If music in a store can guide wine selection, what might the right playlist do for a café or a clothing boutique? If a hint of strawberry scent in an ad can make commuters think of gin, maybe the aroma of fresh bread could nudge grocery shoppers toward the bakery. Indeed, many forward-thinking brands are already exploring this “sensory branding.” A few years ago, one gin company launching a new strawberry-flavored spirit transformed a busy London subway station with the sweet smell of strawberries, literally infusing the scent into their posters to whet passing commuters’ thirsts. In retail design, everything from lighting to texture can be tuned for effect. The weight of a product’s packaging, for example, can send a message about quality: one study found that wine poured from a heavy bottle was perceived as higher-quality and even rated more aromatic than the same wine from a lighter bottle. All these details are part of the environment in which decisions are made. Priming research suggests that every sense can be a channel to the buyer’s mind, if used thoughtfully. A store or campaign that considers all the sensory impressions it creates is essentially creating an experience on a deeper level, one that speaks to customers implicitly as well as explicitly.

There is, however, a catch: because these influences bypass conscious awareness, people themselves remain poor judges of why they do what they do. Ask those wine shop customers why they picked the Pinot Noir, and you’ll hear plenty about grape varietals and price, and perhaps a dismissive laugh at the idea that accordion music had anything to do with it. People aren’t being deceptive; they genuinely don’t feel the subtle prime that pushed them. The workings of priming are, by definition, subconscious, hidden from the very minds they steer. That means that if you’re trying to understand or predict consumer behavior, you can’t rely solely on self-report and surveys that ask, “Why did you choose that?” Often, the honest answer from the consumer would be “I don’t know.” And that would be the truth. Awareness tests in experiments consistently show that participants are typically oblivious to the real influences on them. In the cleaning scent study, for instance, people denied smelling anything unusual, and they certainly didn’t link the scent to their cleaning behavior, yet the influence was real and measurable. This gap between influence and awareness is both the challenge and the thrill of working with priming effects. It requires us to become, in a sense, detectives of the subtle, seeing patterns and outcomes that the subject themselves cannot report.

Priming reveals a humbling fact about the human mind: much of what guides our everyday actions happens in the background. Our brains evolved to take cues from context  (it’s actually an efficient way to navigate a complex world without overthinking every tiny decision). Most of the time, we float along these currents of influence with no trouble. But recognizing that they exist gives us a new perspective on ourselves. It reminds us that reason and willpower, cornerstones of the self, sometimes dance to a tune they don’t consciously hear. If anything, this underscores how deeply we are embedded in our surroundings and how our mind constantly cooperates with cues all around us.

The next time you find yourself humming music hours after leaving a shop, or suddenly craving a food that just so happened to be in the air, it might be an opportunity to pause and wonder. We like to think of our choices as our own, and fundamentally they are, but they are made in specific contexts, rich with sights, sounds, feels, and smells that frame our decisions. Priming is the gentle art of that frame. And as we come to understand subconscious nudges, we gain not only a powerful tool for design and communication, but also a richer knowledge of our own minds. After all, to be human is to be primed, one way or another, by the world we live in; whether it’s the French song in the grocery aisle nudging us toward Burgundy, or the quiet cues of countless other day-to-day encounters shaping choices we think are entirely our own.

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Kristopher Wood
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