When Priming, Conditioning, and Other Temporal Remedies Pretend Genuine Change

Luis A. Marrero

I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” ~ Hermann Hesse’s Demian

Meaningful Purpose Psychology is the cradle of Organization Development 2.0, and studying what makes transformation genuine and lasting has long been a focal point. Whether in education, corporate culture, or societal norms, strategies such as priming, conditioning, and other mechanisms of influence are used to promote desirable behaviors. However, these strategies often fail to address the critical question: Is the change genuine and sustainable, or is it merely a temporary remedy?

This article examines how these mechanisms function, their limitations in promoting intrinsic commitment, and the potential risks associated with their deployment without fostering a deep and meaningful internalization of attributions, beliefs, and values.

The Mechanisms of Influence

Priming: Subtle Nudges to Action

Priming occurs when exposure to a stimulus subconsciously influences subsequent behavior or attitudes. For example, participants primed with words associated with politeness are more likely to exhibit courteous behavior in experimental settings. While priming can produce short-term behavioral shifts, its effects are often fleeting and lack conscious awareness.

Example: A company launches a marketing campaign using images of happy families to subtly prime customers to associate their product with joy and togetherness. While sales may spike temporarily, the deeper question remains:

Do customers truly value the product, or have external cues influenced their decision?

Conditioning: Reinforcing Behavior

Behavioral conditioning, popularized by Pavlov and Skinner, relies on rewards and punishments to shape behavior. Operant conditioning, in particular, reinforces behaviors through the use of positive or negative outcomes. While effective in eliciting desired actions, the behavior often depends on continued reinforcement.

Example: An organization incentivizes punctuality by offering bonuses to employees who arrive on time. Employees comply, but without the intrinsic value of punctuality, the behavior may dissipate if the reward is removed.

Social Influence: Conformity and Obedience

Social influence mechanisms, such as conformity and obedience, exploit human tendencies to align with group norms or comply with authority figures. These behaviors often emerge from extrinsic pressures rather than internalized beliefs.

Example: In Asch’s conformity experiments, participants provided incorrect answers to align with group consensus. Similarly, Milgram’s obedience study demonstrated that individuals would act against their moral instincts when influenced by authority.

The Problem of Temporal Remedies: The Limits of External Influence

Priming, conditioning, and social influence techniques can produce rapid, observable shifts in behavior. Nevertheless, despite their effectiveness in controlled environments, these mechanisms often lack the depth required for authentic transformation. Behavioral adjustments driven by external stimuli tend to be fragile—reverting once the stimulus is removed or its novelty fades. Studies confirm that such changes are frequently context-dependent and lack resilience when not grounded in personal meaning (see End Notes: Doyen et al., 2012; Krpan, 2017).

The Illusion of Genuine Change

While these strategies may create the appearance of progress, they risk promoting performative compliance rather than purposeful growth. In organizational contexts, employees may adopt behaviors to mirror expected norms, but without intrinsic alignment, those shifts are fragile. The absence of value congruence often results in disengagement or quiet resistance, especially under stress or change. What masquerades as transformation may, in reality, be surface-level adaptation with limited sustainability.

The Sleeper Effect and Ethical Concerns

Even more troubling is the long-term impact of influence tactics that bypass critical reflection. The sleeper effect—a delayed form of internalization—demonstrates that individuals may adopt persuasive messages over time without recognizing their origin or evaluating their validity. When this process unfolds without lucidity, it can result in ethical vulnerabilities or misguided behaviors. Historical examples, such as the rise of propaganda-fueled obedience in Nazi Germany, illustrate how social influence—devoid of intrinsic ethical commitment—can enable harm on a massive scale.

A more insidious risk arises when individuals adopt behaviors without critically vetting their alignment with personal values. The sleeper effect—a delayed impact of persuasion—demonstrates how individuals can internalize messages over time without consciously reflecting on them. Historical examples, such as Nazi Germany, illustrate how unchecked propaganda and social pressures can lead to harmful behaviors when intrinsic commitment to ethical values is absent.

The Alternative: Logoteleology and Meaningful Change

Logoteleology, rooted in existential psychology, emphasizes the importance of intrinsic commitment to meanings rich in virtuous values and a purpose to practice them. According to this framework, genuine change requires individuals to critically vet and internalize values, aligning their actions with a sense of meaningful purpose rather than external pressures.

Intrinsic Commitment as a Foundation

Unlike temporal remedies, intrinsic commitment fosters enduring change by aligning behavior with deeply held meaningful attributions, beliefs, and values. When individuals engage in reflective processes to vet and adopt meaningful purposes, their actions become self-determined, self-sustaining, resilient to external shifts, and resistant to manipulation.

Operationalizing Meaningful Purpose

• Corporate Culture: Organizations that foster a sense of shared purpose and intrinsic motivation tend to see more authentic engagement than those that rely solely on extrinsic incentives. This is at the heart of Organization Development 2.0.

• Education: Students encouraged to connect learning with personal meaning demonstrate better long-term retention and application than those motivated solely by grades.

• Societal Change: Social movements grounded in shared values and purpose (e.g., civil rights movements) sustain momentum more effectively than those driven by fleeting emotional appeals.

Conclusion: Beyond Temporal Remedies

Factors	Temporal Remedies	Logoteleological Transformation
Duration	Potentially Short-term	Long-term
Motivation Type	Extrinsic	Intrinsic
Ethical Implications	Manipulative	Authentic
Outcome	Surface Behavior	Meaningful Change

While priming, conditioning, and other mechanisms of influence have their place, they are insufficient substitutes for genuine, meaningful change. Without fostering intrinsic commitment, these strategies risk superficial compliance, ethical vulnerabilities, and behavioral instability.

We must go beyond temporal remedies to create lasting, meaningful virtuous change—whether in individuals, organizations, or societies. By promoting critical reflection, value alignment, and purpose-determined action, we ensure that change is not just behavioral but logoteleologically transformative.

Genuine change doesn’t just redirect behavior—it awakens the person behind it.

End Notes

Priming: Fleeting and Context-Dependent

• A 2023 meta-analysis of 351 studies found that while priming has a moderate effect on behavior (d ≈ 0.37), the effects are highly sensitive to context and goal alignment. When the primed behavior lacked personal relevance or goal mediation, the effect was significantly weakened.

• Replication failures (e.g., Doyen et al., 2012) revealed that experimenter expectations and subtle cues could influence outcomes, suggesting that priming effects may not be robust or durable.

• The Dynamical Systems Perspective (Krpan, 2017) argues that priming effects often fail to persist unless they trigger deeper attractor states—meaning they must align with stable internal systems to endure.

Conditioning: Effective but Often Superficial

• Classical and operant conditioning can shape behavior, but the removal of reinforcement often leads to the extinction of the behavior (Skinner, 1938; Pavlov, 1927).

• Studies show that extrinsically motivated behaviors (e.g., punctuality for bonuses) tend to dissipate when the reward is removed, unless they are internalized through a sense of meaning or value alignment.

Social Influence: Compliance vs. Commitment

• Research on normative social influence (e.g., Asch’s conformity experiments) demonstrates that people often temporarily comply with group norms but revert to their original behavior when group pressure is lifted.

• A study on smoking behavior found that normative pressure led to short-term compliance, but intrinsic motivation was required for sustained change.

• Simply Psychology notes that behaviors driven by conformity are often temporary, especially when they conflict with personal values.

Summary: Why External Influence Falls Short

Mechanism	Short-Term Effect	Long-Term Sustainability	Key Limitation
Priming	Moderate	Fragile	Context-sensitive, lacks depth
Conditioning	Strong	Fragile without reinforcement	Extrinsic, not value-based
Social Influence	Strong under pressure	Reverts when pressure lifts	Compliance ≠ commitment

On the other hand, the logoteleological framework offers the missing depth—lucidity, protomeaning, and intrinsic commitment—that these mechanisms lack. More to be said in the future.

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Sources

The Mechanisms of Influence

Priming: Subtle Nudges to Action

• Priming Theory: Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230-244.

Conditioning: Reinforcing Behavior

• Classical Conditioning: Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes. Oxford University Press.

• Operant Conditioning: Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. B.F. Skinner Foundation.

Social Influence: Conformity and Obedience

• Conformity: Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. Groups, leadership, and men, 222-236.

• Obedience: Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371.

The Problem of Temporal Remedies

The Illusion of Genuine Change

• Corporate Behavior and Values: Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

The Sleeper Effect and Ethical Concerns

• Sleeper Effect: Hovland, C. I., Lumsdaine, A. A., & Sheffield, F. D. (1949). Experiments on mass communication. Princeton University Press.

• Ethical Concerns: Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

• Awakening the Mythical Typhon: Understanding and Addressing the Sleeper Effect with Logoteleology. Marrero, Luis A. (2024) Boston Institute for Meaningful Purpose publication. www.bostonimp.com/blog

Replication Failures – Doyen et al. (2012):

• Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C.-L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). Behavioral priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind? PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029081

Dynamical Systems Perspective – Krpan (2017):

• Krpan, D. (2017). Behavioral priming 2.0: Enter a dynamical systems perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 1204. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01204

The Alternative: Logoteleology and Meaningful Change

Intrinsic Commitment as a Foundation

Krpan (2017):

• Krpan, D. (2017). Behavioral priming 2.0: Enter a dynamical systems perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 1204. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01204

The Alternative: Logoteleology and Meaningful Change

ommitment as a Foundation

Krpan (2017):

• Krpan, D. (2017). Behavioral priming 2.0: Enter a dynamical systems perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 1204. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01204

The Alternative: Logoteleology and Meaningful Change

Intrinsic Commitment as a Foundation

• Logotherapy: Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

• Logoteleology: Marrero, L. A. (2013). The Path to a Meaningful Purpose: Psychological Foundations of Logoteleology. iUniverse.

• Logoteleology: Marrero, L. A., & Persuitte, D. E. (2022). Meaningful Purpose: A Primer in Logoteleology. iUniverse.

• Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Springer Science & Business Media.

• Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.