Can a word read without noticing really change us? The story of “priming” studies

The famous slow-walking experiment (1996), the replication that did not find the effect (2012) and what we learn from the replication crisis

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Translated from the Albanian original by the editors. Shqip

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Illustration: an open hand, a symbol of invisible influences put to the test
Original illustration by the lexoshpejt editors. Not a historical photograph or object.
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In 1996 a study by the American psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues became very famous. Students were asked to form sentences from scrambled words. For some of them the words were related to old age: "grey", "Florida", "wrinkled". After the task, the researchers secretly measured how fast the students walked down the corridor. According to the study, those who had seen the words about old age walked more slowly.

An idea that conquered the books

This experiment and others like it were cited in many popular books as proof that our unconscious is easily influenced by words and images we do not even notice. The ideas spread into motivational books too: if words can change us so easily, then it is enough to fill our mind with good words.

The replication

In 2012 a group of Belgian researchers led by Stéphane Doyen repeated the experiment, but with one important change: walking speed was measured with infrared sensors, not with a stopwatch in a researcher's hand. They did not find the effect. Interestingly, when the researchers timing the walk knew which participants "should" walk more slowly, the effect appeared in their manual measurements. This suggests that the researchers' expectations may have influenced the results.

A beautiful result is not necessarily a true result. Good science tests it twice.

The replication crisis

This was not an isolated case. In 2015 a large project coordinated by the Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate 100 studies published in well-known psychology journals. Only about a third gave results similar to the original. This was called the "replication crisis" and led to important changes: pre-registration of studies, larger samples, publication of data.

This does not mean the unconscious has no influence. It does, in many well-studied ways, such as the anchoring effect or the mere-exposure effect. But the effects are usually smaller and more context-dependent than was claimed.

How to read the claims

  • Ask whether the study has been replicated by other researchers.
  • Be wary of very large effects from very small interventions.
  • Look for reviews and meta-analyses, not just a single study.
  • Remember that science corrects itself. The replication crisis is part of that process.

Sources and further reading

  1. 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. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230
  2. 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. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029081
  3. Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. doi:10.1126/science.aac4716

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