To add some more context: a lot of priming research uses boring measures, often response time on a computer button pressing task. Most of the theory about priming effects is based on studies using these kinds of computer tasks, since they’re easier to run, easier for the experimenter to control, and less stastically noisy (once you average over a hundred trials for each participant). Several studies have found that elderly priming leads to slower response times on computer tasks (e.g., Dijksterhuis, Spears, & Lépinasse, 2001; Kawakami, Young, & Dovidio, 2002).
Then there are some studies which measure more interesting macro behavior like walking. Sometimes these studies are the first to demonstrate a novel theoretical point, but their main advantages are that they show that priming effects translate into meaningful behaviors and that they’re an interesting hook for understanding & explaining the ideas (a lot fewer people would talk about or remember that elderly priming slows you down if the only studies on the topic showed that it slowed response latencies on a lexical decision task by a tenth of a second). But if one study showing a macro behavior effect turns out to have been statistical noise & publication bias (or some other experimental artifact), that doesn’t change much about our best theories of priming.
Looking at the walking speed measure for elderly priming, on the one side we have the non-replications by Doyen and Pasher. On the other side we have Bargh & colleagues’ (1996) original study (study 2a), and an exact replication which Bargh & colleagues published in the same article (study 2b). That is the only paper I know of which includes a direct replication of one of its studies, and it weakens the standard concerns about publication bias, post hoc methodological decisions, and so forth.
There is also a study by Cesario, Plaks, and Higgins (2006) which found that people subliminally primed with photos of elderly men walked slower than people primed with photos of teenage males. The control group in that study was in between but not significantly different from either group (n=61 for the study), which makes it mixed support for the exact Bargh study. (The Cesario study also found that the effect of priming was moderated by people’s attitudes towards the elderly—people who dislike the elderly did not slow down—which led to an argument that priming works differently than Bargh et al claimed. That’s getting pretty far afield, but it could be relevant to the Bargh-Doyen debate if Belgians have different attitudes towards the elderly than Americans.)
To add some more context: a lot of priming research uses boring measures, often response time on a computer button pressing task. Most of the theory about priming effects is based on studies using these kinds of computer tasks, since they’re easier to run, easier for the experimenter to control, and less stastically noisy (once you average over a hundred trials for each participant). Several studies have found that elderly priming leads to slower response times on computer tasks (e.g., Dijksterhuis, Spears, & Lépinasse, 2001; Kawakami, Young, & Dovidio, 2002).
Then there are some studies which measure more interesting macro behavior like walking. Sometimes these studies are the first to demonstrate a novel theoretical point, but their main advantages are that they show that priming effects translate into meaningful behaviors and that they’re an interesting hook for understanding & explaining the ideas (a lot fewer people would talk about or remember that elderly priming slows you down if the only studies on the topic showed that it slowed response latencies on a lexical decision task by a tenth of a second). But if one study showing a macro behavior effect turns out to have been statistical noise & publication bias (or some other experimental artifact), that doesn’t change much about our best theories of priming.
Looking at the walking speed measure for elderly priming, on the one side we have the non-replications by Doyen and Pasher. On the other side we have Bargh & colleagues’ (1996) original study (study 2a), and an exact replication which Bargh & colleagues published in the same article (study 2b). That is the only paper I know of which includes a direct replication of one of its studies, and it weakens the standard concerns about publication bias, post hoc methodological decisions, and so forth.
There is also a study by Cesario, Plaks, and Higgins (2006) which found that people subliminally primed with photos of elderly men walked slower than people primed with photos of teenage males. The control group in that study was in between but not significantly different from either group (n=61 for the study), which makes it mixed support for the exact Bargh study. (The Cesario study also found that the effect of priming was moderated by people’s attitudes towards the elderly—people who dislike the elderly did not slow down—which led to an argument that priming works differently than Bargh et al claimed. That’s getting pretty far afield, but it could be relevant to the Bargh-Doyen debate if Belgians have different attitudes towards the elderly than Americans.)