Have you ever heard of “psychological priming?” Don’t worry if you haven’t, because until very recently neither had I. The term was first coined by John Bargh, a professor of social psychology at Yale University, who has devoted his life to exploring the question of why we behave the way we do.

One of his experiments involved asking two groups of students to make grammatically correct sentences out of different sets of scrambled words. For example, you might receive the following words—ball, the, tossed, he, high—from which you would need to construct a sentence as quickly as possible (i.e., he tossed the ball high). Once the students had successfully unscrambled all ten sets of words, they were to walk down the hall to the professor’s office and personally hand him their completed sheets.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? However, unbeknownst to the students, one group had been given sentences sprinkled with words like “aggressive,” “rude,” “disturb,” and “infringe” … while the other group had words like “respect,” “considerate,” “polite,” and “courteous.”

Two actors were then hired to stand right in front of the professor’s office and pretend to be having a conversation—thus, blocking the students from handing in their assignments. (Incidentally, the actors were instructed to make this conversation as boring as possible!) The point of the experiment was to see if the students primed with “polite words” would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with “rude words.”

Bargh’s initial hunch is that the difference between the two groups would be minimal, at best. After all, these were busy students with things to do. They weren’t likely to wait while two people, whom they did not know, carried on a mundane conversation. But amazingly, there was a difference—a significant difference!

Those primed with “rude words” all interrupted—on average after just a few minutes. However, of those primed with “polite words,” the overwhelming majority—82 percent—never interrupted at all. If the actors had not been instructed to stop their conversation after ten minutes, who knows how long those poor students would have stood in that hallway, patiently waiting?

Bargh decided to call this phenomenon—“psychological priming”—and it has since been confirmed in countless other experiments as well. Bargh is quick to point out, though, that priming is not like brainwashing. You cannot program a person to rob a bank, for example. However, it does appear that the words we read have a powerful influence over how we act—even when we are not consciously aware of it!

Is it any wonder then that so many of us turn to the words of Scripture when we are searching for guidance? The psalmist writes, “I meditate upon thy holy word, O Lord, day and night”—not only because God’s word gives us life … but also because, by immersing ourselves in God’s word, we live our lives differently!