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One word changed how much people shared
The two games
Researchers brought people into a lab and split them into two groups. The same researcher greeted both groups, explained the rules, and ran the game. The games were exactly the same, and the only difference was a single word: one group was told they were playing the Wall Street game, the other the Community game.
The Wall Street players wanted to win, and they shared an average of one-third of their profits. The Community players acted more collaboratively and shared an average of two-thirds. Hearing the phrase Wall Street primed people to think less about sharing.
Priming your calendar
The same priming works on a calendar. Invites titled call, meeting, one-on-one, or Zoom are sterile, and they keep everyone's brain on autopilot. Titles like collaborative session, goal meeting, mastery meeting, team collaboration, or creative hour set up the feeling and behavior the meeting needs, every time someone opens their calendar.
How can a single word change behavior?
Researchers call it priming: seeing a word makes related ideas easier to reach in memory for a short time. In 1971 David Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt showed that people recognized a word like nurse faster right after seeing doctor. The influence takes place outside awareness, which is why the people involved rarely notice it. The speedups in those early experiments were measured in milliseconds.
Why does wording shape choices so much?
In a 1981 paper in Science, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave people a choice between two programs for a hypothetical outbreak expected to kill 600 people. When the options were described as lives saved, most picked the sure option, and when the identical options were described as lives lost, most picked the gamble. The numbers and outcomes were the same in both versions, and only the wording changed. Psychologists call this a framing effect.
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