Priming, Replication, and the Hardest Science

Abstract

Concerns have been raised recently about the replicability of behavioral priming effects, and calls have been issued to identify priming methodologies with effects that can be obtained in any context and with any population. I argue that such expectations are misguided and inconsistent with evolutionary understandings of the brain as a computational organ. Rather, we should expect priming effects to be highly sensitive to variations in experimental features and subject populations. Such variation does not make priming effects frivolous or capricious but instead can be predicted a priori. However, absent theories specifying the precise contingencies that lead to such variation, failures to replicate another researcher's findings will necessarily be ambiguous with respect to the inferences that can be made. Priming research is not yet at the stage where such theories exist, and therefore failures are uninformative at the current time. Ultimately, priming researchers themselves must provide direct replications of their own effects; researchers have been deficient in meeting this responsibility and have contributed to the current state of confusion. The recommendations issued in this article reflect concerns both with the practice of priming researchers and with the inappropriate expectations of researchers who have failed to replicate others' priming effects.

The evolved psychological mechanisms of fertility motivation: hunting for causation in a sea of correlation

“…If the results change with the variant then that variant is likely the cause. There is an increasing call for the use of experimental methods in studying human behaviour [32][33][34]. However, there are challenges in using experimental methods given the complexity and difficulty of conducting experiments in field settings, where it is harder to control conditions.…”

“…Ongoing resistance to experimental methods is due to beliefs that experiments-especially laboratory based experiments-lack realism, generalizability and replicability compared with traditional methods, such as demographic surveys and naturalistic observations [32][33][34]. However, concerns regarding low realism in experimental methods-particularly in laboratory-based experiments-may be outweighed by the benefits of being able to isolate causal effects, and control variation, allowing for the manipulation of environments in a way that is hard to duplicate in naturalistic settings [32].…”

Does a competent leader make a good friend? Conflict, ideology and the psychologies of friendship and followership

“…Research shows that views on mass politics emerge from mechanisms designed to manage small-scale social interaction (Petersen, 2012), and differences in political ideology have been shown to relate to basic differences in how individuals understand and approach the social world (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005;Duckitt & Sibley, 2010;Hibbing, Smith & Alford, 2013, 2014Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009;Oxley et al, 2008). 2 In particular, research has demonstrated a clear link between conservative ideology and perceived level of between-group conflict.…”

Lost in dissociation: The main paradigms in unconscious cognition

“…For instance, Doyen and colleagues (Doyen et al, 2012) were unable to replicate the elderly priming effect of Bargh and colleagues (Bargh et al, 1996), and another study (Harris et al, 2013) reported failure to replicate findings of automatic activation of high-performance goals also in the priming paradigm (see Bargh et al, 2001). Although this has generated an ongoing debate (e.g., Cesario, 2014), it nevertheless casts additional doubt on the automaticity vs. control dissociation in cognitive processing.…”