McDonald: Priming power through writing boosts job interview performance
Emily McDonald · #1 Followed Neuroscientist: Break Your Negative Thinking · Apr 6, 2026 · at 35:10
Neuroscientist Emily McDonald explains the real-world performance effects of cognitive priming during an interview with Codie Sanchez on BigDeal.
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“I was just reading a study about how they actually had people, they asked people to write about a time where they felt very powerful and then they had another group write about a time where they felt powerless, and then they had them go and do an interview. To get a job. And these people that were interviewing them had no idea that even the conditions of the study about power, powerless, any of that, and they ranked the people that did the kind of, where they wrote about a time they felt powerful, those people performed far better than the people who wrote about a time where they felt powerless.”
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