Stéphane Doyen

Who they are

The study Doyen and colleagues set out to reproduce is one of the most reproduced images in social psychology. John Bargh, Mark Chen and Lara Burrows reported in 1996 that participants exposed to words associated with old age subsequently walked more slowly down a corridor. The effect was taken as a demonstration that a stereotype could be activated outside awareness and act directly on behaviour, and it became the standard illustration of social priming.

Doyen, with Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon and Axel Cleeremans, rebuilt the study with a larger sample and a better instrument. Where the original timed the walk with a stopwatch, they used infrared timing gates, which remove the human judgment from the measurement entirely. Across 120 participants, the priming words did not change walking speed.

The second experiment is the contribution. Rather than stopping at a null result, the team manipulated what the experimenters running the sessions believed they would see. Fifty participants were run across ten experimenters, some told to expect slowing and some told to expect the opposite. The slowing appeared, in the participants' actual measured walking speed, where the experimenters expected it and not otherwise. That is a result about the experimenter rather than about the participant, and it is why the paper is a piece of methodology rather than simply a failed replication.

It is worth being precise about what the paper does and does not establish, because the surrounding literature has not always been. It establishes that this effect, in this design, did not reproduce under automated measurement, and that experimenter expectancy is sufficient to produce the result. It does not establish anything about the conduct of the original authors, and this page makes no claim of that kind. The 1996 methods section describes a blind experimenter and a separate hidden timer, and the disagreement between the two teams is a scientific one about measurement and interpretation. That is how it is recorded here.

Key papers

Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C.-L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). "Behavioral priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind?" PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081. One hundred and twenty participants with infrared timing gates and no priming effect. A second study of fifty participants across ten experimenters found that experimenter expectancy moved participants' actual walking speed. Doyen is first author.

The study it addresses:

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). "Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230-244. The elderly-priming walking result, from experiment 2a, with thirty participants. The methods section describes a blind experimenter and a separate hidden timer.

Key ideas

Change the instrument before you draw the conclusion. Infrared gates rather than a stopwatch, and the effect did not appear.

The expectancy result is the stronger half. Experimenter belief moved participants' measured walking speed, which makes this a finding about how the measurement is produced rather than only a null result.

A failed replication is a disagreement about evidence. Nothing in this work speaks to the conduct of the original authors, and nothing of that kind is claimed here.

Sample size and measurement are the two things the original could not defend on. Thirty participants timed by hand, against a hundred and twenty timed automatically.

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