173. How Important Is Your Choice of Words?

What happens when three psychologists walk into a magic show? What’s Angela’s problem with the word “talent”?  And why does LeBron James refer to himself in the third person? SOURCES:John Bargh, professor of psychology at Yale University.Derren Brown, mentalist.Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University.Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.Barbara Mellers, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.Daniel Southwick, visiting professor of psychology at Brigham Young University and former N.F.L. quarterback.Lior Suchard, mentalist.RESOURCES:"4 Ways to Get Into the Magic Castle," by Stephanie Breijo (TimeOut, 2023)."The Trouble With Talent: Semantic Ambiguity in the Workplace," by Daniel A. Southwick, Zhaoying V. Liu, Chayce Baldwin, Abigail L. Quirk, Lyle H. Ungar, Chia-Jung Tsay, and Angela L. Duckworth (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023)."A Decade of Power Posing: Where Do We Stand?" by Tom Loncar (The Psychologist, 2021)."Influencing Choices With Conversational Primes: How a Magic Trick Unconsciously Influences Card Choices," by Alice Pailhès and Gustav Kuhn (PNAS, 2020)."If You Want Your Marketing Campaign To Succeed, Choose Your Words Carefully," by Allan Hug (Forbes, 2019)."What's Next for Psychology's Embattled Field of Social Priming," by Tom Chivers (Nature, 2019)."Silent Third Person Self-Talk Facilitates Emotion Regulation," by Christopher Bergland (Psychology Today, 2017)."Disputed Results a Fresh Blow for Social Psychology," by Alison Abbott (Scientific American, 2013)."A Proposal to Deal With Questions About Priming Effects," email by Daniel Kahneman (2012)."Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?" by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans (PLoS One, 2012).Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (2011).