Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?

Abstract

The perspective that behavior is often driven by unconscious determinants has become widespread in social psychology. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows' (1996) famous study, in which participants unwittingly exposed to the stereotype of age walked slower when exiting the laboratory, was instrumental in defining this perspective. Here, we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study. Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and experimenters' expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect. Further, debriefing was suggestive of awareness of the primes. We conclude that unconscious behavioral priming is real, while real, involves mechanisms different from those typically assumed to cause the effect.

The elusive nature of the blocking effect: 15 failures to replicate.

“…Rather than attempting to address this issue as a yes-or-no question, other researchers have started to focus on the conditions under which a social priming effect can be observed and the mechanisms that mediate its occurrence (e.g. Bargh, 2006;Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012;Gomes & McCullough, 2015;Sharrif & Norenzayan, 2015), an avenue, we argue, that would be fruitful for the blocking effect as well.…”

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…Recently, there has been an increasing focus on reproducibility in psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) and worries about claims that only certain researchers have the right ‘flair’ to replicate studies (Baumeister, 2016). Confederate studies in particular may be susceptible to such effects (Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012), or participants may be behave differently with confederates (Kuhlen & Brennan, 2013). All these factors make confederate interaction studies hard to replicate.…”

Can the behavioral sciences self-correct? A social epistemic study

“…However, in the late 2000s, psychologists started reporting failed replication attempts of important social priming findings (Doyen et al, 2012;Harris et al, 2013;Shanks et al, 2013). This led other researchers to organize replication e↵orts, and unfortunately the number of failures to replicate increased.…”