Priming as a tool for triggering prosocial behavior

Priming is a cognitive bias influencing, in various forms, daily life of people. This paper examines the effect of priming in economics, where subjects are often forced to make decisions under uncertainty. The empirical part of this paper introduces the experiment, where subjects were manipulated towards or against prosocial behaviour with verbal priming techniques. The experiment results show that priming to specific concepts correlated with a tendency to act prosocially actually increases the subsequent degree of prosocial behaviour, although the same evidence has not been found with the opposite case