title: Unpriming: the deactivation of thoughts through expression.
abstract: Unpriming is a decrease in the influence of primed knowledge following a behavior expressing that knowledge. The authors investigated strategies for unpriming the knowledge of an answer that is activated when people are asked to consider a simple question. Experiment 1 found that prior correct answering eliminated the bias people normally show toward correct responding when asked to answer yes-no questions randomly. Experiment 2 revealed that prior answering intended to be random did not unprime knowledge on subsequent attempts to answer randomly. Experiment 3 found that exposure to the correct answer did not influence the knowledge bias but that exposure to the incorrect answer increased bias. Experiment 4 revealed that merely expressing the answer for oneself was sufficient to unprime knowledge. Experiment 5 found that each item of activated knowledge needs to be unprimed specifically, in that correctly answering 1 question does not reduce the knowledge bias in randomly answering another.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. sparrow@wjh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Betsy
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sparrow
authors.forename: Daniel M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Wegner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D001364:Awareness; D003463:Cues; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005794:Generalization, Response; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012718:Set, Psychology; D013850:Thinking; D014705:Verbal Behavior