In an experiment which became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University - most aged eighteen to twenty-two - to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, "finds he it yellow instantly"). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, Forgetful, Bald, Gray, or Wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. The short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from the words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.