There's Nothing Social about Social Priming: Derailing the \"Train Wreck\
Sherman and Rivers argue that the category at the centre of psychology's most public argument does not exist. Social priming was the label attached to a set of high-profile findings that later failed to replicate, but many of those studies were not particularly social, and other priming effects that are unambiguously social are robust and were never grouped under the term. Their claim is that the label was constructed after the fact around the failures, and that it obscured the thing that actually predicts whether a priming effect replicates, which is the design of the experiment rather than the subject matter. They demonstrate that point with simple examples showing how design choices change reproducibility. Their recommendation is to retire the term and stop arguing about whether particular effects are real, on the grounds that the field's real deficit is theoretical: without an account of the mechanism, every result and every failure remains uninterpretable. This is the most useful reference for the state of that dispute.
Sherman and Rivers argue that the category at the centre of psychology's most public argument does not exist. Social priming was the label attached to a set of high-profile findings that later failed to replicate, but many of those studies were not particularly social, and other priming effects that are unambiguously social are robust and were never grouped under the term. Their claim is that the label was constructed after the fact around the failures, and that it obscured the thing that actually predicts whether a priming effect replicates, which is the design of the experiment rather than the subject matter. They demonstrate that point with simple examples showing how design choices change reproducibility. Their recommendation is to retire the term and stop arguing about whether particular effects are real, on the grounds that the field's real deficit is theoretical: without an account of the mechanism, every result and every failure remains uninterpretable. This is the most useful reference for the state of that dispute.
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Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). "There's nothing social about social priming: Derailing the 'train wreck'." Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1-11. Within-subjects paradigms become undetectable when reanalysed between subjects.
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2021.1889312
DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2021.1889312