Archived discussions following to Doyen et al failure to replicate Bargh Chen & Burrows 1996 Supplementary material for Nelson et al., “Psychology’s Renaissance”, in Annual Review of Psychology. This copy: March 27, 2017 In our Annual Review article on “Psychology’s Renaissance” we refer to an exchange triggered by Doyen et al’s failure to replicate the original article by Bargh et al. Below we have compiled some key exchanges that ensued among the original first author, John Bargh, a science journalist Ed Yong, Nobel Laurette, Danny Kahneman, and social psychologist Norbert Schwarz. In this first page we include an link to the original URLs (when available), a link to the web‐archived copy, and to a .pdf printout of those sites stored in the OSF. All those .pdf files were combined into a single file and presented in the pages that follow. – 0 – 1) John Bargh’s. Psychology Today Blogpost, March 5th, 2012, “Nothing in Their Heads” Note: this blogpost was subsequently deleted, but archived copies are available: Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the‐natural‐unconscious/201203/nothing‐in‐their‐heads 2nd copy (.pdf): https://osf.io/bgb3c/ 2) Ed Yong. Blogpost in Discover, March 10th, 2012 “A failed replication draws a scathing personal attack from a psychology professor” Original URL: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/03/10/failed‐replication‐bargh‐psychology‐study‐doyen Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/03/10/failed‐replication‐bargh‐psychology‐study‐doyen 2nd copy (.pdf): https://osf.io/esgdh/ 3) Danny Kahneman’s open letter, September 26 2012, as made available in Decision Science News (a blog hosted by Dan Goldstein) Original: http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/10/05/kahneman‐on‐the‐storm‐of‐doubts‐surrounding‐social‐priming‐research Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/10/05/kahneman‐on‐the‐storm‐of‐doubts‐surrounding‐social‐priming‐ research/ 2nd copy: 4) Ed Yong. Nature News. October 3rd, 2012. “Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act” Original url: http://www.nature.com/news/nobel‐laureate‐challenges‐psychologists‐to‐clean‐up‐their‐act‐1.11535 Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nature.com/news/nobel‐laureate‐challenges‐psychologists‐to‐clean‐up‐their‐act‐1.11535 2nd copy (.pdf) https://osf.io/gcske/ 5) Norbert Schwarz. Response to Ed Young’s questions, October 2nd 2012. Posted on Google Docs. Original url: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1KKN5Gz35CPz6QmtpJ7‐cIwdLG_zeceuu67WRmlE6U8A Archived copy (.pdf): https://osf.io/v3435/ Nothing in Their Heads | Psychology Today http://web.archive.org/web/20120307100648/http://www.psychologytoda... A narcissist will almost certainly look good in public but infuriate you in private. Mark Banschick, M.D. Home Find a Therapist Topic Streams Get Help Magazine Tests Psych Basics Experts Previous Post Automaticity in cognition, motivation, and emotion. Does Kanye West by John A. Bargh, Ph.D. believe in free will? Yes and no... Nothing in Their Heads Debunking the Doyen et al. claims regarding the elderly-priming study Subscribe to The Natural Unconscious Published on March 5, 2012 by John A. Bargh, Ph.D. in The Natural Unconscious Subscribe via RSS Welcome back to "The Natural Unconscious," which returns after a hiatus of a couple years. Why we went underground for awhile is a topic for a later post; we'll get to that soon. John Bargh is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Scientific integrity in the era of pay-as-you-go publications and superficial online science more... journalism. What prompts the return of the blog is a recent article titled "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?" by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans. The researchers reported that they could not replicate our lab's 1996 finding that priming (subtly activating in the minds of our college-age experimental participants, without their awareness) the stereotype of the elderly caused participants to walk more slowly when leaving the experiment. We had predicted this effect based on emerging theory and evidence that perceptual mental representations were intimately linked with behavioral representations, a finding that is very well The Natural Unconscious established now in the field (see below). Following their failure to replicate, Doyen et al. went on to show that if the experimenter knew the hypothesis of the study, they were able to then find the effect. Their conclusion was that experimenter expectancies or awareness of the research hypotheses had Debunking the Doyen et al. claims regarding the elderly-priming therefore produced the effect in our original 1996 study as well—in other words, that there was no study actual unconscious stereotype effect on the participants' behavior. One's belief in free will goes missing The Doyen et al. article appeared in an online journal, PLoS ONE, which in the face of others' disapproval Related Articles quite obviously does not receive the usual high scientific journal standards Experimental of peer-review scrutiny (keep reading for the evidence of this); instead, the One reason the public needs to know Philosophy Month journal follows a "business model" in which authors pay to have their about limits to their free will To Ignore or Confront? Dealing with Racially articles published (at a hefty $1,350 per article). The journal promises a Stereotyping "rigorous peer review" for technical soundness but not as to the What I think about what he thinks I Comments importance of the finding. On their website PLoS dismisses the use of think The Greater Good: Psychology and Social knowledgable editors to oversee what gets published and what does not, Policy claiming this adds only a subjective element to the acceptance decision The debate itself, the newsletter articles, and now the blogs Sneaky Commercials: that can be biased against new research directions. But knowledgeable The Unconscious Way editors also can prevent articles from being published based on faulty peer TV Makes You Eat Why Personal Science reviews, such as by inexpert, lazy, or biased reviewers. Expert editors also is a Good Idea know the relevant theory and past research in a given domain, and also know of common methodological pitfalls that inexpert researchers in the domain—such as, apparently, Doyen et al. (keep reading)—can fall prey to. Most Read Most Emailed Find a Therapist 1 Teasing and Bullying, Boys and The lack of rigorous expert editorial scrutiny by PLoS in the Doyen et al. Girls Search for a mental case means that I must supply it here, only after it has been published. If by Nancy Darling, Ph.D. health professional near you. I'd been asked to review it (oddly for an article that purported to fail to replicate one of my past studies, I wasn't) I could have pointed out at that 2 How Your Greatest Insecurities time the technical flaws, though these might not have mattered to PLoS Reveal Your Deepest Gifts by Ken Page, L.C.S.W. ONE—as a for-profit enterprise, PLoS published 14,000 articles in the year 2011 alone. Fourteen thousand. Something tells me they don't turn down 3 What Makes A True Friend many $1,350 checks... by Alex Lickerman, M.D. Although the essentially self-published nature of the Doyen et al. article is bad enough, the misleading conclusions it drew were made even worse by 4 The How and Why of 100 Years of the publicity given to them by some online science-journalism blogs, one of Happiness Find Local: which posted about the Doyen et al. failure with the title "Primed by by Howard S. Friedman, Ph.D. Acupuncturists expectations: Why a classic psychology experiment isn't what it seemed". Chiropractors So as you have read this far, and are therefore a reader interested in 5 What Nonbelievers Believe Massage Therapists by David Niose Dentists psychological science, I'd like (and apparently need) to set the record and more! straight. There are two main reasons why the Doyen et al. conclusions, and those 1 of 3 3/27/2017 11:33 AM Nothing in Their Heads | Psychology Today http://web.archive.org/web/20120307100648/http://www.psychologytoda... in science journalism blogs that swallowed their conclusions whole, are Clos 36 captumisleading and false. The first is that in our original 1996 research the 7 7 Mar 12 -experim 28 Dec 16 e 201120122013 Help experimental condition of the participant and did not even collect the main dependent variable of walking time down the hall. Thus there is no way in our original 1996 studies that the effects could have been produced by Are You with the Right Mate? It is natural to wonder if your partner experimenter expectations. The second is that Doyen et al. did not follow is the right one for you. our original procedure (which is what one must do when attempting to MORE FROM THIS ISSUE replicate a study) but instead made critical changes that are known (in social psychology, which is not Doyen et al's field of specialization) to ISSUE ARCHIVES eliminate the stereotype-behavior effect. I'll take these points one at a time. SUBSCRIBE 1. The experimenter was entirely blind to hypotheses and participants' experimental conditions in the 1996 elderly-priming study. As recounted elsewhere, when we designed and ran the elderly stereotype priming studies (actually, back in 1991), we had solid theoretical reasons to hypothesize the effects we did obtain. But we were very careful to make sure that experimenter bias could not cause the effect. The experimenter who ran the participants in the study was blind to the study hypotheses, and all he did was to greet the participants and give them an envelope.