The Application Papers are your opportunity to practice applying social psychological theories and terms to explain behavior in non-academic contexts. The first paper asks you to stretch into a relatively new controversy in social psychology: The ‘replication crisis.’
First, please read ‘The Power of Suggestion’ here. (PDF version if you cannot open the file from its original site) This will give you a good overview of the controversy (and as it specifically applies to automatic social processing), written for a more general audience. Also, a more recent 2019 discussion What’s next for psychology’s embattled field of social priming
Then, listen to a related podcast: You Are Not So Smart: The Replication Crisis. This podcast includes other examples of research (e.g., “ego depletion” ) that has been recently challenged (the first 14 minutes), a discussion of the replication crisis (the middle part, about 20 minutes) and the open-science movement (the last 14 minutes, optional).
Lastly, answer the following questions:
- What are the priming effects that Bargh’s original studies showed? Why is priming research coming under scrutiny?
- What kind of information is needed to replicate a study? Why is replication important to science?
- What’s the “replication crisis?” Consider all materials you are asked to read/listen to, do you think it’s a crisis or a cause for concern? Why or why not?
- How do these materials help you understand the challenges in conducting social psychology research?
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