House and the Effects of Priming

            Do you think that you have control over your thoughts? The truth of the matter is that our thoughts are more malleable and dynamic than one thinks. What we think and how we act are based upon the situations and events that have preceded our current situation. The way one person goes about thinking about a particular scenario can and most often will be drastically different from another. This is part of what makes us human and individualistic, however depending on one’s past experiences, the way in which they think and thus interpret present and future events can be jeopardized.

            For example, one of my latest Netflix obsessions is the medical drama House. House is set at the fictional Princeton Plainsboro teaching hospital, and focuses heavily on Dr. Gregory House and his diagnostic team. The show also features House’s best friend Wilson, the hospital's Head Oncologist as well as Dr. Cuddy who is the hospital’s Dean of Medicine as well as House’s moral compass.

            In one episode in particular House and Dr. Cuddy are flying back from Singapore after attending a conference on pandemics. As they are flying, Dr. Cuddy notices that one of the passengers on the plane begins to suffer from what she deduces is bacterial meningitis. Dr. Cuddy insists that the plane turn back, as she fears for a massive outbreak of the disease on the plane, and thus a mini pandemic of their own. House being the stubborn man he is denies the existence of this illness and just shrugs it off without a second thought, insisting the plane stay on course. The flight continues, but as Dr. Cuddy feared many of the individuals on the plane start exhibiting the same symptoms as patient zero, including her. House, being the only medical professional still in good health, tries to perform a risky lumbar puncture to test for meningitis on patient zero, but the test turns out negative.

            With one last option, House performs what seems like a ludicrous test. House makes up a symptom for the perceived “illness”, a tremor in the hands, and just as he suspected upon presentation, everyone on the plane immediately exhibited the tremor. This test confirmed House’s assumption that everyone on the plane was exhibiting a common symptom of a pandemic, mass hysteria. With the rest of the plane under control House could focus on diagnosing patient zero, which in end was only was a minor case of decompression sickness associated with scuba diving.

            Of course, despite House being a medical genius, what exactly drew him to this conclusion of mass hysteria as well Dr. Cuddy’s misdiagnosis of bacterial meningitis? As it turns out, psychological research on the effects of priming and schemas about illness can help shed some light on this question (Henderson, Orbell, & Hagger, 2007). In a dual experimental study, undergraduate students were asked to complete two modified Stroop tasks where they were either primed with a neutral condition (describe the last time you went shopping), or primed with situations depicting a particular illness (describe the last cold you had) or in the second experiment, read a narrative on cardiovascular illness. As the results suggested, when primed the respondents were much faster at detecting words related to the common cold or cardiovascular illness as opposed to neutral words in both Stroop tasks as the participants exhibited an attentional biases towards these words related to illness.

            These cognitive measurements go undetected in our everyday lives, but severely affect how we interpret the world around us. Viewed through a social psychological lens, by attending the pandemic conference, both Dr. Cuddy and Dr. House were primed on all the past research on pandemic illness and its presentation in society. For example, pandemics are known for spreading quickly and a disease like bacterial meningitis is incredibly contagious especially in a small confined space like a plane. Also, with pandemics come mass panic, which can lead to hysteria amongst a population. It is only natural after viewing the research done by Henderson et al., that Dr. Cuddy and Dr. House would interpret the situation the way they did as information on pandemic illness was most salient in their minds, causing both to have an attentional bias towards diseases that can spread quickly and cause mass panic in their diagnostic processes. 
             Unfortunately, due to priming Dr. Cuddy was misguided by patient zero's general and ambiguous symptoms altering her schema of illness in a negative way, while Dr. House was right in his diagnosis...again. Maybe had Dr. Cuddy attended a scuba diving class while in Singapore, this situation would have unfolded in a very different way? One in which half of the passengers do not jump out of their skin with fear. Do you still think you have complete control over your thoughts, or are you just currently succumbing to the effects of priming?

Reference:

Henderson, CJ., Hagger, MS., & Orbell, S. (2007). Does priming a specific illness schema result in an attentional information-processing bias for specific illnesses?. Health Psychology, 26, 165-173. doi:10.1037/0278-6133.26.2.165


Posted by: Michael Andre