Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?
Doyen and colleagues tried to repeat one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, in which people exposed to words associated with old age walked more slowly when leaving the laboratory. Their first attempt, with a larger sample and automated timing rather than a stopwatch, found no effect. The second attempt is the one worth citing. They manipulated the experimenters rather than the participants, telling half of them that primed participants would walk more slowly and half the opposite, without changing anything the participants experienced. The walking effect appeared, but only among experimenters who expected it. Debriefing also suggested participants were more aware of the primes than the original account assumed. The authors are careful in their conclusion: they do not claim behavioural priming is nonexistent, but that the mechanism in this case involved the experimenters' expectations rather than an unconscious effect of the words. This vault cites it whenever the walking study is invoked.
Doyen and colleagues tried to repeat one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, in which people exposed to words associated with old age walked more slowly when leaving the laboratory. Their first attempt, with a larger sample and automated timing rather than a stopwatch, found no effect. The second attempt is the one worth citing. They manipulated the experimenters rather than the participants, telling half of them that primed participants would walk more slowly and half the opposite, without changing anything the participants experienced. The walking effect appeared, but only among experimenters who expected it. Debriefing also suggested participants were more aware of the primes than the original account assumed. The authors are careful in their conclusion: they do not claim behavioural priming is nonexistent, but that the mechanism in this case involved the experimenters' expectations rather than an unconscious effect of the words. This vault cites it whenever the walking study is invoked.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
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. N = 120 with infrared timing gates, no priming effect; a second study of 50 participants across 10 experimenters found experimenter expectancy moved actual walking speed.
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Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029081
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029081