It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind? The participants, or the experimenter’s?

In PLoS One, an article by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans entitled “Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?” They begin:

“In their seminal series of experiments, Bargh Chen and Burrows (1996) demonstrated that activating a trait construct such as “being old” is sufficient to elicit behavioral effects in the absence of awareness. Bargh et al.’s demonstration involved asking participants to indicate which word was the odd one out amongst an ensemble of scrambled words a number of which, when rearranged, form a sentence. Unbeknownst to participants, the word left out of the sentence was systematically related to the concept of “being old”. The beauty of the experiment lies in its unusual dependent measure: walking speed. Those participants who had been exposed to words related to old age walked slower when exiting the laboratory than the participants who had not been so exposed. Further, the effect was claimed to occur without awareness, as participants were found not having noticed the link between exposure and their behavior. This striking finding, now widely cited, established that priming may occur automatically and influence behavior with little or no awareness. It subsequently generated considerable further research in social psychology.

Here, we sought to replicate Bargh et al’s experiments…”

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