Different people seem predisposed to view the world in
different ways. Thus people behave differently from one another even
when in the same situation. According to Allport (1961): “For some the
world is a hostile place where men are evil and dangerous, for others it
is a stage for fun and frolic. It may appear to be a place to do one’s
duty grimly; or a pasture for cultivating friendship and love”.
These
differences in perception can be partly explained by the mechanism of
priming. It’s likely that that throughout a child’s development some
ideas are primed over and over again (that honesty is important/or that
greed is important) and so the child becomes alert to these things
throughout his or her life. Basically these constructs become
chronically accessible and influence the way the child views the world.
Priming a semantic category makes the category more likely to be used
later if it’s plausible (e.g. watching aggressive TV primes other
semantically related pathways, that is related to aggression, and makes
the aggression more likely to be used later). So watching violent TV
will mean your mental pathways are constantly being primed with
associations related to aggression and this thinking says: more likely
to make you aggressive.
So once some idea has been primed spreading activation causes easier
access to related memories. So this view sees your knowledge is an
elaborate web of associations. When a memory node is activated i.e. the
201-lecture memory node has been activated because you are here now,
then a partial activation spreads to nodes related to that one. So
because something in some way linked to 201 has become partially
activated it makes it easier for that thought or memory to become fully
active.