Anatomy of a Train Wreck : The Rise and Fall of Priming Research.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leys, Ruth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Causation.

Priming (Psychology).

Psychology--Research.

Psychology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (413 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

A history of “priming” research that analyzes the field’s underlying assumptions and experimental protocols to shed new light on a contemporary crisis in social psychology. In 2012, a team of Belgian scientists reported that they had been unable to replicate a canonical experiment in the field of psychology known as “priming.” The original experiment, performed by John Bargh in the nineties, had purported to show that words connoting old age unconsciously influenced—or primed—research subjects, causing them to walk more slowly. When subsequent researchers could not replicate these results, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warned of a “train wreck looming” if Bargh and his colleagues could not address doubts about their work. Since then, the inability to replicate other well-known priming experiments has helped precipitate an ongoing debate over what has gone wrong in psychology, raising fundamental questions about the soundness of research practices in the field. Anatomy of a Train Wreck offers the first detailed history of priming research from its origins in the early 1980s to its recent collapse. Ruth Leys places priming experiments in the context of contemporaneous debates over not only the nature of automaticity but also the very foundations of social psychology. While these latest discussions about priming have largely focused on methodology—including sloppy experimental practices, inadequate statistical methods, and publication bias—Leys offers a genealogy of the theoretical expectations and scientific paradigms that have guided and motivated priming research itself. Examining scientists’ intellectual strategies, their responses to criticism, and their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, Anatomy of a Train Wreck raises crucial questions about the evidence surrounding unconscious influence and probes the larger stakes of the replication crisis: psychology’s status as a science.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Rise of Attribution Research

2 Intentions and Causes

3 John Bargh’s Approach to Automaticity

4 “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being”

5 The Chameleon Effect

6 A Theory in Crisis?

7 The Fate of Priming

8 “Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?”

Conclusion: The Two Camps

Appendix: Bargh on Unconscious Intentionality

References

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226836942

0226836940

OCLC:

1472149408