Jeffrey Sherman
Jeffrey Sherman is a social psychologist at the University of California, Davis, and first author of the sharpest defence social priming has: that the problem was never the idea, it was the instrument. He and Andrew Rivers made the case in 2021 under a title showing how little patience they have for the label: "There's nothing social about social priming".
Who they are
Sherman works on social cognition, stereotyping and the formal modelling of automatic and controlled processes, and it is the modelling background that shapes the argument. His objection is statistical rather than theoretical, and that is what makes it hard to dismiss.
Several priming paradigms in cognitive psychology reproduce reliably, run after run, lab after lab. All of them share a design feature: they are run within subjects. Each participant supplies many trials, contributes their own baseline, and serves as their own control, so the between-person noise that swamps small effects is removed by construction.
Sherman and Rivers take those same robust paradigms and reanalyse the data the way social priming was almost always conducted, with one measurement per person and condition assigned between subjects. The effects do not shrink in an orderly way. They disappear into the noise.
If that is the story, the field's error was not believing in unconscious influence. It was taking a small, variable effect and testing it with the least sensitive instrument available, publishing whatever emerged from the far end, and building a literature on the survivors. That account explains the pattern better than either "the effects are fake" or "the effects are real but fragile", because it predicts exactly which studies replicate and which do not without needing any claim about the researchers' honesty.
Their further recommendation is that the term "social priming" should be retired altogether, on the grounds that the content of the prime was never what distinguished this literature. The design was.
Read charitably, that is a field admitting it tested its claims in the weakest possible way. Read strictly, it still leaves no surviving between-subjects social prime, and the within-subjects results that do survive turn out not to discriminate between the automaticity account and its alternatives.
Key papers
Key papers
Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). "There's nothing social about social priming: Derailing the 'train wreck'." Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1-11. First author. The argument that the replication record of social priming is explained by its design rather than by its subject matter. Reliable priming paradigms from cognitive psychology are run within subjects, so each participant supplies many trials and serves as their own control. Reanalysed as one measurement per person with condition assigned between subjects, which is how social priming was almost always conducted, the same effects disappear into the noise. Their recommendation is that the label be retired, because the content of the prime was never what distinguished the literature.
Payne, B. K., Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L., & Loersch, C. (2016). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(10), 1269-1279. The within-subjects demonstration his argument leans on, and the reason it is a claim about instruments rather than a dismissal of the idea.
Key ideas
The design, not the content. Nothing about a prime being social makes it fragile. Being measured once per person does.
Reanalysis as demonstration. Taking a reliable within-subjects effect and re-cutting it between subjects is a cheap, decisive way to show what the design costs.
Retire the term. A label that groups studies by the topic of the prime rather than by the method obscures the thing that actually explains the replication record.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). "There's nothing social about social priming: Derailing the 'train wreck'." Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1-11.
- Payne, B. K., Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L., & Loersch, C. (2016). "Replicable effects of primes on human behavior." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(10), 1269-1279. The within-subjects demonstration.