a useful tool?

In a task designed to determine whether religion points people toward morality (defined here as prosocial behavior), researcher Azim Shariff used implicit priming (a word-jumble game that contains certain terms, in this case ones associated with religion) to see whether participants would be more likely to share money.

The upshot appears to be: Yeah, they will, regardless of whether they are theists or atheists. Of course, there's plenty of room to wonder what exactly was at work, but the religion-words-primed participants were much more share-y than the non-religion-words-primed participants.

In this particular experiment, the participants had to decide how to allocate $10 between themselves and an unsuspecting other (unsuspecting in the sense that if you took $9, they wouldn't know they were getting a worse deal than if you took $6).

This leads me to wonder whether other sorts of implicit priming could be used to point people in the direction of parting with their money. For example, the longer you play cards against the house in a casino, the more likely you are to lose. So maybe casinos already (or could choose to) employ some sort of priming to keep people at the tables for another hand.

Maybe that's what Jack and Cokes are for.