Normally I would have posted this little observation in the Psychological Methods Discussion Group on Facebook, but Facebook is past its prime (and evil) and the group is dying. We lack an open space (US: watercooler) to share observations about psychology. So, I am posting it here and you are welcome to like or comment on the post, just like you might have in the discussion group. Maybe we can create something better in the future.
The Experimental Priming Paradigm
Psychology is not driven by theories, but rather research paradigms (Kuhn, 1962; Meisner, 2011). To my knowledge, there have been no systematic studies of the birth, rise, and death of paradigms in psychology (probably with the exception of behaviorism).
Priming research is an ideal candidate to study the demise of a paradigm in real time. To be clear, we have to distinguish cognitive priming that occurs with attention and within a few seconds from social, behavioral, or implicit priming. The paradigmatic example of social priming is Bargh’s elderly priming studies in 1996. In this study, students were presented with worlds related to older people and two p-values below .05 suggested that this made them walk slower.
Figure 1 shows how often the word “prime” was used in an article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. There were only 4 articles. The rise of the (social) priming paradigm is visible and continues up to 2012.
In 2012, an article was published that reported a failure to replicate the famous elderly priming study. This was remarkable because psychology journals did not publish replication failures. To publish these results, the authors had to use a new journal that did not priorities significant results (or should we say repress non-significant results?) (Doyen et al., 2012; PlosOne).
A single replication failure alone would not have doomed the priming paradigm. However, several factors amplified the impact of this replication failure. First, Bargh made the classic mistake to draw attention to it by attacking the researchers that had dared to publish these unflattering results. Second, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahnman had just published a book that featured social priming results as important evidence that human behavior is often driven by situational cues outside of their awareness. Kahneman wrote an open letter to Bargh demanding evidence that the replication failure was a fluke and that most priming effects can be replicated. And that is where the real problem stated. Bargh never bothered to try again, but others did and produced failure after failure. It became apparent that all of the significant effects in journals were just selected to confirm priming effects and that disconfirming results were suppressed. Kahneman then retracted his endorsement of priming research (Schimmack et al. 2017).
The impact of the replication crisis in priming research is visible in Figure 1. The number of studies that mention prime in the abstract in JESP is done to 2 studies in 2024. However, the graph also shows that citations have not decreased to the same extent. The decrease in the past couple of years is encouraging, but is not specific to priming research (Schimmack, 2025). Even if there is a decrease, it is small compared to the decrease in new studies that use the priming paradigm. This means that many authors mindlessly cite priming articles without awareness that claims in these articles are not empirically supported. In this way, bad science is like plastic garbage in the oceans. We do not have scientific standards for the use of published articles.
On the bright side, we can use research activity as an indicator of the health of a paradigm. This indicator shows that social priming research is dying. The smart rats have left the ship a long time ago and have found new paradigms to publish.
References
Meiser, T. (2011). Much Pain, Little Gain? Paradigm-Specific Models and Methods in Experimental Psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(2), 183-191. https://doi.org/10.1177/174569161140021