ROSES CHOCOLATES & VALENTINE'S DAY

Ohhh hello hellooo dear English speaking-thinking-reading-hearing listener, welcome back to me, @sciencemug, the blog-podcast-twitter&Instagram accounts-entity behind an unsuccessful e-shop that tells you science stories from a dystopian parallel dimension where: 1) volcanoes erupts hot chocolate and anatomically accurate hearth-shaped anise candy, 2) bunnies have enslaved all the dentists of the world using evil hypnotic carrots-sticks which flash orange light beams and fluffy thoughts, 3) roses rule with an iron-yet-scented fist all the countries which name starts with ‘L’, and 4) nothing at all make sense except for Kenny’s mumbling.
Aaand that does all of this in Eng?ish, a language that is to real English what a dolphin is to a fish and The Fast and the Furious 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, The Fate of the Furious, and Hobbs & Shaw are to something else than a sorry excuse to make money.

PiPs Valentine's Day by @sciencemug

Today’s the most artificial and fake festivity of the year folks, so happy Valentine’s Day and, for that, I bring you an almost interesting science Valentine’s story (by the way, if you do need a last minute gift, well pal, check out my love e-book, or explore the “Love & its accomplices” collection of my e-shop! Yeah, I know, such a coherent blog I am…)

- Valentine's Day post 2016 -
- Valentine's Day post 2013 -

Sooo, the story.
Vivian Zayas, Gayathri Pandey and Joshua Tabak (aka the VGTs) are three folks from the Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. JT works also for a little company that you may or may not have heard ‘bout, but that’s nevertheless renowned to do care about privacy and to not at all abuse its position to pry into/profit on its users personal data: Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA.

The three fellas do a study and find out that -brace yourself folks, ‘cause this is a huge revelation, huge-: “red roses and gift chocolates are judged more positively in the U.S. near Valentine’s Day” (P). And they publish their finding on the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Oh man, if I don’t love psychology papers…

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(Background song in the "commercial break": Love Wins by Lee Rosevere; CC4.0)

Ok, jokes aside, there’s (not much) more: indeed the researchers say that their finding is the first “evidence of naturally occurring cultural priming” (P).

Whaaaat?

Ok, let’s try and explain step by step what on earth is the cultural priming thing.

One: the VGTs call red roses and chocolates “attitude objects” (P). Now, in pshycologish, attitude's definition starts complex and broad with the 1935 Allpor’s one: “a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (1)… Yeah dude, me neither.
Then the ‘70s come, and everything’s chillier, more relaxed and, like skirts, shorter: “Attitudes are likes and dislikes” [Daryl Bem, 1970 (1)].
Moreover, nowadays, attitudes are equated with “evaluative judgments” (1).

Two: the VGTs say that attitude objects are like a network of inter-joined units, so that,