Audience design: embedded versus word search priming

Abstract

The present study looks at manipulating audience design using different priming techniques. We were trying to test the effectiveness of different priming techniques (priming words embedded in a story versus priming words embedded in a word search) on audience design by making people more or less helpful in a story retelling task. A time constraint was also introduced to see if the effect of word search priming would be cancelled out. In order to answer these questions two experiments were run with one looking at the effectiveness of embedding words in a story to prime helpfulness or unhelpfulness with the hypothesis that these stories would prime people in such a way that would affect the quality of their story retelling. The second experiment’s hypothesis was that a strict time constraint would cancel out the effect of the priming from the word search task. Finally, our results pointed to a possible effect of priming using words embedded in a story on quality of stories written. However we cannot be sure that the priming was the source of the differences in audience design. The word search version of the experiment did not give conclusive results but pointed to a general trend of strict time constraints cancelling out the effects of priming.