Professor priming - or not

Decision Making
Replication
Author

Michael

Published

November 13, 2017

This was my first contribution to a Registered Replication Report (RRR). Being one of 40 participating labs was an interesting exercise – it might seem straightforward to run the same study in different labs, but we learned that such small things as ü, ä and ö can generate a huge amount of problems and work (read this if you are into these kind of things).

Here is one of the central results:

So overall not a lot of action … our lab was actually the one with larges effect size (in the predicted direction).

Here is the abstract of the whole paper and here the Commentary by Ap Dijksterhuis naturally, he sees things a bit different: Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with an intelligent category (“professor”) subsequently performed 13.1% better on a trivia test than participants primed with an unintelligent category (“soccer hooligans”). Two unpublished replications of this study by the original authors, designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, observed a smaller difference between conditions (2-3%) as well as a gender difference: men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%) but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multi-lab Registered Replication Report (RRR). A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, with 23 laboratories meeting all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic result of those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493) of the updated version of the original study, examining the difference between priming with professor and hooligan on a 30-item general knowledge trivia task (a supplementary analysis reports results with all 40 labs, N = 6,454). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with professor and those primed with hooligan (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.