Big Ups: Prime time

“It’s a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.” — Daniel Kahneman

Whether or not you are familiar with priming experiments, you have surely taken part in them. In his book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes one by psychologist John Bargh, which had this remarkable effect: “The participants were primed with thoughts of cooperativeness, and sure enough, they were far more cooperative.”

While I’m no psychologist, my interests in wordplay are highly aspirational. The notion of being able to predispose others’ thoughts by using…