Thinking Fast And Slow Rhetorical Analysis

In the excerpts from “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman it talks about how by doing certain tasks your actions can change without you even knowing. This excerpt talks about how the brain reacts to different situations, for example, “if you saw the word eat you are more likely to word fragment SO_P as soup than as soap”. By seeing the word eat you are more likely to think about food which makes you change your thought process/ it manipulates your mind. The rest of the excerpt is more ways that people were tested to see how their attitudes/behaviors would change after certain tasks. This is how your mind is manipulated without you even knowing.

In this excerpt there are two different types of ways that people's minds were manipulated.
The first way is called the priming effect. The priming effect is like ripples on a pond, when you say a word like “eat”, part of your brain is temporarily thinking about all things that are connected to food. Priming can also change your nature emotionally and physically. For example an college professor by the name of John Bargh conducted a study on the group of students, these student had to make sentences out of words like florida,old, and grey, all things that are associated with elderly people. When finished this task the students were asked to walk down the hallway to another room, The students that made the sentences were noticed to be moving slower and more sluggish like elderly people. This is how the priming effect works, even without noticing your brain has the element of the elderly people and because of this it causes you to change your actions without even knowing.

The second way is call the ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect is a “priming phenomenon-the influencing on an action by the idea”. This effect also works in reverse, for example, a German university conducted a study where a group of students walked “around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which is one third of their normal pace”. After this the university had the group of students look at the same group of words with words like old,lonely, and forgetful. The students were quickly able to recognize that the theme of the group of words was related to old age. This is possible because they were moving at a slow pace like elderly people so part of their brains had the element of old age on it. This is the ideomotor effect.

In a person's life the experiences and environment around the person can shape the person's behavior and how the person grows. This excerpt suggests that the experiences and environment around you really do have an effect on you. This is shown with the priming effect and the ideomotor effect. It is also seen in everyday life for example, I know that I have grown up in a house with loving parents and a great family, because of this I am able to succeed and reach my goals in things like sports and academics, my parents also raised me to have manners and treat people with respect. This example shows how the experiences you have and the environment around you can really influence who you are as a person. In the end, the influences that you receive in your everyday life, the good and the bad, are constantly influencing you to become the person you are.