During one of the poster sessions at this year's Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I spotted a poster titled "Do Social Psychologists Cause Priming Research, or Does Priming Research Cause Social Psychologists?" by Arina K. Bones and Sam Gosling. They use some creative research methods, and their findings may surprise you.
For the first study, they submitted dozens of papers on priming research to top social psychology journal. "The absurdity of the findings were intended to prevent the articles from appearing in print." Nevertheless, all were accepted. This submission process was in itself a way to prime the peers acting as reviewers for the journals by exposing them to priming research. It turns out that the psychologists who reviewed the papers produced more subsequent social psychology research than did other psychologists. It appears that priming research may indeed cause social psychologists.
(Identifying the anonymous reviewers presented a hurdle, which Bones and Gosling overcame by analyzing the reviews for self-references and references to the psychologist Roy Baumeister. "Every human has a unique Baumeister/Self-reference (BS) index, providing a linguistic fingerprint," they write.)
The second study looked at whether exposure to priming research could induce social psychologist behavior in someone not already a psychologist. A dozen graduate students were fitted with an Unobtrusive Head-Mounted Recorder (pictured). To maintain the subjects' blindness to experimental condition, the device was installed while the subject was sedated, and colleagues were told to pretend not to see it. (Instructions included, "If asked, 'Is there something on my face?' you must respond 'Did your advisor just say something?' to reinforce manipulation and induce cognitive load.")
The devices played prerecorded descriptions of priming research throughout the the day, and behavior was measured using metrics such as whether the students obtained social psychology Ph.D.s and how many Malcolm Gladwell books they gave to family members. Preliminary findings support the hypothesis.
You can download a PDF of the poster from Bones's home page. She's implicitly affiliated with Brian Nosek, but most of her previous work has been with Navin Johnson, including the paper "Measuring the Immeasurable: Or 'Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?'"
In any case, Bones and Gosling raise an important question in this research. The direction (and existence) of causality should never be assumed, as Randall Munroe has also addressed in his work:
Update: When asked for comment on responses to the poster, Bones emailed: "Perhaps the most shocked reaction came from my collaborator - ol' Gosling. He claims no memory of having worked on the project. Otherwise, most people have found the effects to be rather obvious -- didn't everyone already know this, they ask? Professional jealousy I think."
[Note: There has been some confusion regarding this entry's April 1 posting date. I am reporting an actual poster I actually saw at an actual conference in an actual month called February (with--get this--only 28 days. Come on!) Beyond that, I cannot vouch for Bones's scientific integrity.]
