The whole field of social priming has been called into question as literally the poster child for the replication crisis. Even Daniel Kahneman, who was a huge proponent of this kind of work, has more recently had to concede that it is not robust and has called on the field to face up to this fact (View Highlight)
priming metodología replicabilidad
What best predicted whether a judge granted someone parole versus more jail time? How long it had been since they had eaten a meal. Appear before the judge soon after she’s had a meal, and there was roughly 65 percent chance of parole; appear a few hours after a meal, and there was close to a 0 percent chance. (Page 106). This particular study is trotted out frequently, again to show how much our behavior – even on really important decisions such as this, made by people literally selected to be professional decision-makers – is driven by subconscious biological states, such as how hungry we are. This very famous example appears to actually be driven by the fact that defendants without representation, who are less likely to get parole, tend to have their cases scheduled right before lunch (because they’re quick). (View Highlight)
In another neuroimaging study, performance on a frontal task declined in subjects primed with pictures of spiders (versus birds); among African American subjects, the more of a history of discrimination, the more spiders activated the vmPFC and the more performance declined. Again, recent work has highlighted how unreliable these kinds of studies are. In particular, studies that look across the whole brain for any kinds of differences between test groups are typically statistically “under-powered” by two to three orders of magnitude. That is, many of them have samples in the tens, when, to be reliable, they would need samples in the thousands or tens of thousands. (View Highlight)