It's Priming Time

Hello all:
It has been an interesting and exciting week in AP Research. The mini dab has emerged as a new trend in our class, and my topic has changed (yet again). As of last week, my topic was about how time pressure affects price anchoring effects, but after talking with Saara and Divya, I realized that I needed to focus on a specific price decision in order to make my research work. Since many of the studies I read on time pressure were about risk-related behaviors, it only seemed natural to look into gambling, because it is a widespread, risky behavior that involves making decisions about money. When I looked into gambling studies, most of them did not involve price anchoring because price anchoring is an explicit form of influencing people's decisions, which is not used in real-life gambling situations. However, I did find another , more subtle version of price anchoring that is very applicable to gambling: priming. Priming is essentially subconscious price anchoring; people pick up on cues that influence their decisions without even knowing it is happening. By modifying my topic to how time pressure affects priming during gambling, I focused my research and made it more significant to real-world situations. Now that I have changed my topic to priming, it is only fitting to have a picture of "Prime Time" Deion Sanders.

Now that my topic has finally been set, I can move on to discussing how my literature review will work. I envision myself starting by talking about the gambling industry and how many people are affected by it as well as the amount of money involved in the industry. I will also talk about how casinos use certain techniques to influence their customer's behavior and to make money. Then I envision myself transitioning into a discussion about priming. This seems to logically flow because I will have just talked about tactics casinos use to influence behavior. After introducing priming, I will talk about how casinos use time pressure to influence its customers and more broadly talk about how time pressure influences risk-based behaviors, including gambling. After that, I will explain why my research is relevant by showing why time pressure and priming are inter-related. I plan to do this by looking into a specific gambling game. Right now I think roulette is the best option for the game since there have been studies talking about roulette and roulette has a time pressure element to it (when the dealer says five seconds until s/he spins the wheel). Also roulette has many numbers involved, so it is an interesting game to look at for priming. That is my rough guess of how my literature review will look, but as I read more sources, I'm sure the most relevant organization will be come clearer to me.
A source that has been important so far in my research is "Decision Making under Time Pressure, Modeled in a Prospect Theory Framework," by Diana L. Young, Adam S. Goodie, Daniel B. Hall, and Eric Wu. This source explains how time pressure alters people's judgment and pushes people towards riskier decisions. For example, in one experiment they presented participants with two bets and in time pressure situations they took the riskier one more often. This source is fundamental in my paper since it shows why looking at time pressure and risky behaviors is relevant, but it also leaves a gap for my paper to explore. In the experiments done by Young et al. the participants had no prior predisposition to one bet, but in real life that is not the case. Another one of my sources, "Unconscious Numerical Priming Despite Interocular Suppression," explains that people are constantly exposed to numbers and signals that they are not aware of, but nonetheless influence their decisions. The intersection of these two sources leaves an interesting gap for me to research: looking into risk-base time pressure decisions when the subjects have been exposed to a predisposition (priming).
Finally, in response to Mrs. Haag's final question about the John Oliver rebuttal. I think it is a great idea and a good use of class time. I think that it will help us practice thinking critically about other people's arguments and that it will be valuable for us in research. I also think that we can totally win, so I definitely wouldn't mind doing a little extra work out of class so that we can do the exercise.

To all who read to the end, thanks for reading my extra long blog post today. As a reward (or extra punishment depending on who you are), here is a final picture of Hurricane Harambe. (777)