Sally Satel reports in an article in NY Times several attempts that fail to replicate certain priming studies, most notably, the study that showed that being exposed to the words "Florida", "Bingo", and "Gray" -- words associated with being old and, well, slow -- resulted in people walking more slowly. If I am not mistaken, this and other studies were conducted/supervised by John Bargh when he was at NYU (he's now at Yale) though he is never named but NYU is identified. You can read Satel's article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/psychology-research-control.html?_r=0
I admit to not have kept up to date on the priming research in the social cognitive psychology area but I was aware that some people were beating up on poor John for not being able to replicate some of his priming studies. If memory serves, John threw a fit in public (on a blog or similar public arena), made fun of research published in the journal PLoS One (but retracted it when he realized it wasn't a pay-per-page novelty journal), and has been defending himself and his research ever since. My own feelings about the matter are that there are probably a variety of situations where one can show priming, if one defines priming as "having the experience of one stimulus affect the processing of other stimuli and subsequent behavior". Strong priming effects are obtained under strict lab conditions and with carefully selected stimuli. David Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt first showed priming effects on the lexical decision task back in 1971 and a variety of variations have shown similar priming effects (e.g., my master's level research showed semantic priming in a bilingual version of the lexical decision task -- Roger had been on the Stony Brook faculty when I got there and I got the idea in research meetings he and my research advisor held jointly). I haven't seen any meta-analyses but it is possible that social priming effects might be weaker in nature or require very specific conditions (or maybe just NYU intro psych subject pool participants). In any event, there are a variety of issues surrounding the Bargh and related situations (i.e., failure to replicate) that should be of interest to Tipsters, even if one doesn't care for people associated with AEI (for those unfamiliar with AEI, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute ) However, Norm Ornstein who is affiliated with AEI seems like an okay guy. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=23927 or send a blank email to leave-23927-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
