Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behaviour can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack.
A paper published in PLoS ONE last week1 reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 (ref. 2) by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.
And a bit later:
An acrimonious e-mail debate on the subject has been dividing psychologists, who are already jittery about other recent exposures of irreproducible results
Good! Â They should be jittery, science of this sort has been shaky for years. Â In psychology (and other fields) there are too many positive results and not nearly enough attempts to replicate!
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Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology
Failure to replicate intelligence-priming effects ignites row in research community.
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Publish or perish.
Crap published
Surprise!