You Don’t Really Have FREE WILL

“If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are tempo­rarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

“Priming effects take many forms. If the idea of EAT is currently on your mind (whether or not you are conscious of it), you will be quicker than usual to recognize the word SOUP when it is spoken in a whisper or pre­sented in a blurry font. And of course you are primed not only for the idea of soup but also for a multitude of food-related ideas, including fork, hungry, fat, diet, and cookie. … Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas. The mapping of these ripples is now one of the most exciting pursuits in psychological research.

“Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware. In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University — most aged eighteen to twenty-two — to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (e.g., ‘finds  he  it  yellow  instantly’). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young partici­pants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.

“The ‘Florida effect’ involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. When they were questioned afterward, none of the students reported noticing that the words had had a common theme, and they all insisted that nothing they did after the first experiment could have been influenced by the words they had encountered. The idea of old age had not come to their conscious aware­ness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon — the influencing of an action by the idea — is known as the ideomotor effect.

“The ideomotor link also works in reverse. A study conducted in a German university was the mirror image of the early experiment that Bargh and his colleagues had carried out in New York. Students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely….

“Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to your left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by purs­ing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. Col­lege students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larsons The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were ‘smil­ing’ (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were ‘frowning.’ In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures — starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.”

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 52-54.

How (and When) God Arrived to “Bless America”

Given that America is a Christian nation founded solely on Judeo-Christian principles (a false claim that Christians would have you believe), U.S. presidents have always ended their State of the Union speeches with “God bless America,” right?

Wrong.

As noted by Robert Schlesinger, opinion editor of U.S. News and World Report (and son of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

George Washington gave the first address in 1790. Thomas Jefferson thought a speech in person too “kingly” and gave Congress written ones, as did the next 13 presidents until Woodrow Wilson, who revived the oral address. Franklin Roosevelt was the first to call it “The State of the Union.”

None of them ended their speeches with “God bless America,” nor did any president until Richard Nixon in a non-SOTU address from the Oval Office.

According to David Domke and Kevin Coe, the occasion was Nixon’s address to the nation in the midst of the Watergate scandal on April 29, 1973. (Not until November did he say something most of us alive then will never forget: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”)

He ended the April 29 speech with this: “Tonight, I ask for your prayers to help me in everything that I do throughout the days of my presidency. God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.”

In a 2008 Time magazine piece, Domke and Coe write that not only was there no “God bless America” in any State of the Union speech, but that Nixon’s uttering it in 1973 was the only time it appeared in any of the 229 major presidential speeches from 1933 to January 1981, when Jimmy Carter left office. The men co-wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (2007).

They say that the phrase and requests for divine guidance really took off with Ronald Reagan: 

“Presidents from Roosevelt to Carter did sometimes conclude their addresses by seeking God’s blessing, often using language such as ‘May God give us wisdom’ or ‘With God’s help.’ But they didn’t make a habit of it. In fact, five of the eight presidents during this period concluded this way in less than 30% of their speeches. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Ford did so a bit more often, but still none of these presidents concluded even half of his addresses this way. Reagan, on the other hand, ended 90% of his major addresses by requesting divine guidance. George H.W. Bush also did so in 90% of his speeches, and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush followed suit 89% and 84% of the time, respectively.

“Pandering to believers has become politically expedient, “the Pennsylvania Avenue equivalent to the taglines of Madison Avenue,” Coe and Domke contend. And they conclude:

The phrase is a simple way for presidents and politicians of all stripes to pass the God and Country test; to sate the appetites of those in the public and press corps who want assurance that this person is a real, God-fearing American. It’s the verbal equivalent of donning an American flag lapel pin: Few notice if you do it, but many notice if you don’t.

How did Barack Obama end his SOTU speech Jan. 25? Yup.

“Thank you. God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.”