Never Leave Your Room

A priming/contamination explainer with a decision-hygiene takeaway: a salient stimulus can hijack judgment for minutes. Examples — a briefcase primes competitive play in the Ultimatum Game (Kay/Wheeler/Bargh/Ross 2004); a St. Nicholas hat makes Dutch kids share, a Toys 'R' Us logo makes them hoard; subliminal 9/11 strings push Bush approval from 42% to 75%; and polling location shifted 2000 Arizona votes ~3 points (school -> pro-education, church -> socially conservative), surviving regression controls and a lab replication. Techniques: avoid salient stimuli right before important decisions; decide in a neutral environment ('your room') and stick to it — the Jeffreyssai/Kellhus 'blank your mind' tradition. Caveat the post could not have: much of this social-priming literature (and the money/location effects) later became prominent replication-crisis casualties, so the empirical floor is shakier than the confident 2012 presentation implies.

Quality 69 · Strong. Upper-Solid. Engaging and clearly written, with a still-reasonable practical takeaway (decide in a neutral environment), but it curates others' studies and a careful reader now knows much of this priming literature failed to replicate — which lowers its quality-as-it-reads-now below the cleaner cognitive-bias explainers.

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. Moderate — mostly reportage of others' priming studies; the freshness is in pairing them with an explicit rationalist decision-hygiene technique.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A priming/decision-hygiene explainer curating others' (now largely unreplicated) studies; pedagogical reach within the community, no concrete material-world change → RWI 2.