Your brain is being programmed by forces you never consciously notice
Picture this. Somebody is watching the news, and the anchor keeps using the phrase “border crisis” over and over across the whole hour. Later that day, a pollster calls and asks what they think about immigration policy. And suddenly they’re way more worried about it than they were yesterday.
They got played. They just don’t know it yet.
Ian Tuhovsky breaks this down in Critical Thinking: Think Clearly in a World of Lies. The book is largely about how brains get manipulated by forces nobody consciously notices, and Chapter 10 focuses specifically on priming – which Tuhovsky defines as planting an idea in someone’s mind to influence them later.
That news example isn’t a hypothetical. It’s how it actually works. Researchers have shown again and again that the specific words media outlets choose – “crisis” versus “situation,” “illegal aliens” versus “undocumented immigrants,” “riot” versus “protest” – aren’t just different flavors of the same description. They shape how the audience thinks about the issue. And when people are asked later why they hold certain views, they’ll always give rational reasons about economics or security or values. Nobody says “because I heard the word ‘crisis’ seventeen times before breakfast.”
That’s because nobody knew they heard the word seventeen times.
This is priming. Somebody gets exposed to a stimulus – a word, an image, a sound, a smell – and their brain automatically activates related concepts. Those activated concepts then shape their next thoughts and actions without them ever noticing it happened.
Essays 1 through 4 covered the bones of why this is so easy to pull off. System 1 is fast and automatic, System 2 is lazy, heuristics handle most judgment work on autopilot, and cognitive ease makes familiar things feel true. Priming is what loads the dice before System 1 even starts playing. It sets the associations your brain will reach for a few minutes or a few hours later, without anybody being aware the game was rigged.
Tuhovsky points out that priming works by setting off a cascade of related ideas in your neural network. It’s completely unconscious. You’re getting constant nudging from ideas forming in your adaptive unconscious mind, and you’re generally unaware of any of it.
The old-age walking study is the classic example, and it’s still shocking.
Researchers had people unscramble sentences that happened to contain words related to being elderly – “Florida,” “forgetful,” “bald,” “wrinkled.” After finishing the task, those people walked more slowly down the hallway than the control group. They didn’t know they were walking slowly. They didn’t connect it to the word puzzle. But their bodies responded anyway.
This is called the ideomotor effect. The mere thought of a behavior can trigger that behavior without any conscious intention. A brain reads “old age,” activates concepts related to moving slowly, and the body just does it.
Which should make you a little uncomfortable about how much is under your conscious control.
Priming threatens a basic piece of how most people think of themselves – as conscious, autonomous agents who make decisions, choose actions, and have reasons for what they do. Priming research says a lot of that is an illusion. The choices feel chosen from the inside. They often weren’t.
Tuhovsky emphasizes that priming is used constantly in the modern world by advertisers, marketers, and political campaigns, to shape buying behaviors and political views. It works because System 1 can’t defend against it.
Look at political campaigns. There’s a reason candidates use the same slogans over and over, repeat the same phrases in every speech, and stick to rigidly consistent language. They’re priming. Each repetition activates the neural networks they want their audience to access when they think about them or their opponents.
“Make America Great Again” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a priming tool. Every time somebody hears it, their brain activates whatever associations they have with greatness, with America, with nostalgia, with their own memories of earlier decades. By the time they’re actually evaluating policy positions, all of that is already running in the background, coloring their judgment.
The same mechanism runs in the opposite direction with attack phrases. Call somebody a “socialist” enough times, and voters start associating that person with every negative concept they’ve ever attached to socialism – even if most of them couldn’t define socialism if you paid them. The label does the work. The priming shapes the perception. The actual substance of anyone’s policy ends up being almost beside the point.
This connects directly to cognitive ease from Essay 4. When your brain mistakes familiarity for truth, priming is what manufactures the familiarity. Repeat something often enough, in enough contexts, and it starts to feel true – not because anyone evaluated evidence, but because System 1 has been primed to accept it.
Advertising figured this out a long time ago. That’s why the same commercial runs ten times during one football game. They’re not trying to persuade with rational argument. They’re priming your brain so that when you’re standing in the store in front of the shelf, their product feels right. Familiar. Easy to pick.
To be fair, Tuhovsky notes that priming can be used positively too. Teachers prime students by exposing them to material beforehand, which helps them perform better. Same mechanism, pointed somewhere helpful.
But most of the priming flying at people all day isn’t pointed somewhere helpful. It’s pointed at somebody else’s bank account or somebody else’s vote tally.
The really frustrating part is that awareness doesn’t make you immune.
Even when people know they’re being primed, even when they’ve been explicitly warned about the manipulation, it still works. System 1 processes those associations automatically. You can’t turn it off by deciding to. Which raises the obvious question – if you can’t escape priming, what can you actually do about it?
A few things.
First, notice the environment. Before making a decision, pay attention to what you were just exposed to. What was the headline? What music was playing? What phrases were being repeated? Recent exposures are priming judgment right now, whether or not anyone’s noticed.
Second, slow down. Priming operates on System 1. When you actually engage System 2 and think through your reasoning, you create a gap between the priming stimulus and the response. That gap is where the override has to happen.
Third, get suspicious of repetition. When you keep seeing the same phrase, the same slogan, the same framing across multiple outlets, that’s somebody trying to prime you. They’re planting seeds in the neural networks of an audience. The fact that something feels familiar, feels right, feels obvious – that’s not evidence. That’s priming doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Look at how political debates get framed. The language isn’t neutral. “Tax relief” primes differently than “tax cuts.” “Climate change” hits differently than “global warming.” “Pro-life” versus “anti-abortion.” These aren’t just word choices. They’re strategic priming engineered to activate specific associations before anyone starts thinking about the substance.
Here’s the pattern across all five essays so far. Your brain runs two systems. System 2 is lazy and avoids work. System 1 fills the gap with shortcuts. Those shortcuts produce cognitive ease when information feels familiar and coherent. And priming is how the sense of familiarity gets installed in the first place, without anyone’s consent or awareness.
You are being manipulated constantly.
The thoughts that feel natural, the judgments that seem obvious, the choices that appear self-evident – a lot of them were shaped by priming effects nobody ever noticed. And the people doing the priming have been studying this stuff for decades. They’re not confused about how it works.
Tuhovsky describes priming as the secret handshake of the subconscious mind. Persuasion involves conscious effort and logical argument. Priming is the silent mechanism that pre-tunes the brain. It sets the channel before the broadcast begins.
Which is a lot of why critical thinking is so hard. It isn’t just about fighting external misinformation. It’s about fighting manipulation that happens below the level of conscious awareness, before deliberate thinking even gets a chance to kick in. By the time System 2 shows up, System 1 has already been primed. The game is rigged before anyone knows they’re playing.
The only real defense is vigilance. Notice what you’re being exposed to. Question why certain phrases keep getting repeated. Recognize when a choice feels too easy, too obvious, too right. That feeling of certainty is often just priming in a disguise.
Your brain is being programmed right now.
The question is whether you’re going to pretend it isn’t happening, or actually start paying attention to who’s doing the programming.