A Case of Unintended Cognitive Consequences: Guns Prohibited Images Prime Aggressive Thoughts

Abstract

We conducted an experiment to discover if guns-prohibited images prime aggressive thoughts as has already been demonstrated with gun images in other experiments. Ninety-three university students were randomly assigned to one of three prime conditions (gun, gun with a strikeout, and a flower) and then were given an aggressive word completion task. The results showed that participants in both the guns-prohibited image and gun image conditions completed a higher proportion of aggressive words than those in the neutral image condition, thus replicating and extending the weapons priming effect. The findings suggest that even weapon images intended to serve some prosocial purpose may have unintended cognitive consequences, especially given how ubiquitous these images are in many public places.