Thank you for pointing out the issues behind “priming”. The cult of believers that’s grown up around Daniel Kahneman and others (including many in the Positive Psychology) field is distressing. To Kahneman’s credit, even he recognized issues within the field back a couple of years in an online post.

Some issues that come to mind in this field are 1). Scientists who want to be famous, do TED talks, and get that sweet sweet consulting money instead of humbly contributing to the field and 2). The ethical issues all of this has when these findings are applied to things like Facebook, various apps, etc.

Also to take a page from the gender movement, what’s with the binaryness of liberal and conservative? Those were handy labels at one point, but they’ve utterly failed to catch up to the world we’re in. A lot of liberals are now arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy, while conservatives are starting to back unions (conservatives and unions tends to unite every 60 years or so around the issue of immigration). These labels are old and useless.