Get busy living

The words we read and the sentences we listen to have an enormous bearing on our approach to life

I’m sometimes left pondering whether it’s my life-long love of history that resulted in my son choosing to read history at university. And whether it was my impassioned interest in environmental issues since being an undergraduate at the start of the 1990s that has resulted in my daughter becoming a vegan. Of course, both teenagers would deny such a connection.

Yet I’m left puzzling over whether there has been some sort of priming effect, slowly permeating our home environment over the past decade, with the use of specific language and ideas equating in these outcomes for my son and daughter.

Our home and work environment certainly shape our behaviour, but the words we read and the sentences we listen to also have an enormous bearing on our approach to life.

This is particularly heightened when millions of us are using technology to work and study from home, while we regularly consume newsfeeds, social media and entertainment.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, refers to a classic experiment conducted by psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues. They asked students aged 18 to 22 at New York University to construct four-word sentences from a set of five words. For example, “finds he it yellow instantly”.

One group of students received a scrambled set of words related with the elderly. Being America, these words were Florida, forgetful, bald, grey, or wrinkle. In the US, Florida is a wellknown location for retirees. After the students finished the task of building out the sentences, they were asked to undertake another experiment in an office down the hall.

Unknown to the students, the actual experiment was the short walk. Bargh and his researchers measured the time it took the young participants to get from one end of the corridor to the other. What they found was that the young people who had formulated a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway much slower than the others.

In other words, the students were being primed in two ways. First, the set of