Comments on: Primed by expectations – why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it seemed

By: Gabriela Jiga

Gabriela Jiga — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:33:22 +0000

Thanks Ed. I think you should also correct it in your rebuttal after Bargh’s post in Psychology Today. In there, you’ve copy-pasted the section where you describe his procedure.

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:17:00 +0000

Fair point. Corrected. Thanks, Gabriela.

By: Gabriela Jiga

Gabriela Jiga — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:37:47 +0000

Ed, you are wrong about a fact in Bargh’s original paper. You say “Back in 1996, John Bargh and his colleagues found that infusing people’s minds with the concept of age could slow their movements. The volunteers in the study had to pick the odd word from a group of scrambled ones.” A scrambled sentence test is not at all what you describe here: Participants never have to “pick up” the odd word from a group of scrambled ones. If they had to do that, the whole priming procedure would be compromised, because you would be surprised by participants’ ability to detect an objective of a study or a prime. A scrambled sentence test is not an intelligence test in which you need to say which word doesn’t ‘go’ with the others! Instead, in a scrambled sentence test participants need to form grammatically correct sentences with, say, 5 words out of 6. The whole aim is to expose them to primes illustrating a certain theme (the stereotype of the elderly, in Bargh’s 1996 paper) without them noticing this! I am simply surprised that you don’t describe this procedure correctly – because from what you say, readers with no social psychology knowledge understand something completely different and this is misguiding them in forming their impression of this whole controversy.

By: Eric R.

Eric R. — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:19:27 +0000

Chris wrote: “I have heard from more than one lab that couldn’t replicate the original study.” This points to another reason why it is important that non-replications get peer-reviewed and published. Of course is it essential that researchers get a balanced view on the robustness and scope of an effect. But another thing is that as long as non-replications do not get published, researchers cannot judge the quality of those studies, nor can they try to systematically test and rule out alternative explanations based on those studies. Non-replications that do not get published are doomed to an existence as persistent rumours, and rumours are not science.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:52:24 +0000

I am a professional research psychologist at a major university and I have heard from more than one lab that couldn’t replicate the original study. These labs didn’t publish the results because the costs of publishing a failure to replicate are high (read: pushback from the authors of the original paper) and more importantly the rewards are low: most of the top-tier for-profit journals are not interested in null results, even when they are failures to replicate.

Ed – a worthwhile message to push from your pulpit: granting agencies should reward researchers who publish null results and researchers who submit to journals that do not discriminate against null results (such as PLoS ONE, where this study was published).

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:42:02 +0000

For anyone interested, I’ve written a follow-up post about Bargh’s response http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/03/10/failed-replication-bargh-psychology-study-doyen/

By: Jane

Jane — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:46:15 +0000

John Bargh should not have had to do your work for you- this article far overstates the findings of Doyen et al., and Bargh is not to blame for that. You are.

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:08:50 +0000

Interesting. I note again that I asked John Bargh for a comment when I wrote about this paper, and I contacted other psychologists for their views. If there were problems with the methodology, I would gladly have highlighted them, or changed the focus of the piece. Instead, no one threw up such views and Bargh himself deliberately chose to say very little – note the quote. “There’s not much I can say,” quoth he.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? Because he has now written a two-page opinion piece outlining the supposed flaws in the Doyen et al. study.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:53:32 +0000

John Bargh has published a reply to the Doyen article (also mentioning this blog post):

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-natural-unconscious/201203/nothing-in-their-heads

By: MattK

MattK — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:21:39 +0000

Joe, you said “I did not mean my comments to come across as unnecessarily derisive.” (gratuitously mean-spirited and undignified would be more precise, IMHO), but if that is actually the case, maybe you should consider how source delivery style influences message effectiveness.