Aytürk, E., & Saribay, S. A. (2026). Neglect of the individual as a neglected problem: The relevance of combined idiographic-nomothetic approaches for social psychology today. Self and Identity. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2026.2697941

Aytürk and Saribay (2026) make a useful methodological argument in “Neglect of the individual as a neglected problem.” Social psychology typically averages across people even though the same situation may have different psychological meanings for different individuals. They advocate greater use of personalized stimuli and intensive repeated-measures designs to identify person-specific processes before generalizing across people.

They also suggest that this problem might help explain replication failures in social priming. For example, “elderly” might evoke a frail grandparent for one person and a vigorous retiree for another. Averaging across these individuals could obscure different or even opposing effects. This is a reasonable hypothesis. It is also useful that the authors explicitly acknowledge low statistical power, questionable research practices, and publication bias as established contributors to replication failures.

The problem is that they nevertheless cite Bargh et al. (1996) rather uncritically. The famous finding that activating the elderly stereotype makes people walk more slowly is treated as an example of a potentially heterogeneous priming effect, without informing readers that the original effect became a prominent example of psychology’s replication problems. Doyen et al. (2012), using a larger sample and automated measurement, failed to reproduce the original effect in their first experiment.

There were earlier attempts to explain the inconsistent findings by invoking individual differences. For example, Cesario et al. (2006) reported that elderly priming slowed participants with relatively positive attitudes toward elderly people but sped up those with negative attitudes. Other studies similarly reported moderator effects. But these small-sample studies do not provide strong evidence that a robust main effect was merely hidden by heterogeneity. Cesario et al.’s study, for example, had only about 67 participants for the relevant analysis and did not obtain a conventionally significant overall priming effect. The evidential burden therefore shifted to an interaction estimated from an even less powerful design.

This is important because interaction effects are generally more difficult to estimate precisely than main effects. Finding a significant personality moderator in a small study does not establish that a failed main effect was really caused by individual differences. The moderator itself needs adequate power and independent replication. A more detailed discussion of these purported replications of elderly priming is available in “Elderly Priming: Did It Ever Work?”

Here Aytürk and Saribay’s methodological proposal may actually provide a better way forward. Intensive repeated measurement can obtain much more information from each participant and therefore can study within-person Person × Situation effects with fewer participants than a conventional design may require. This comes at a cost: many observations per person are needed, and ecological or experience-sampling studies typically sacrifice some of the experimental control available in tightly controlled laboratory experiments. Moreover, any between-person moderator still ultimately depends on having enough individuals.

Thus, the proposal itself is worth pursuing. Low power means that the failed priming literature often provides lack of evidence rather than definitive evidence of absence. Small, conditional, person-specific priming effects remain possible.

But they remain hypotheses to be demonstrated. Individual heterogeneity can explain variation in a real effect; it cannot by itself establish that an unreliable effect is real. A 2026 article explicitly concerned with the replication crisis should therefore not cite Bargh et al. (1996) without acknowledging the replication failures that make the existence of the phenomenon itself uncertain.