Talk:John Bargh

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 September 2019 and 18 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): LukeMarkham.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:18, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

IP editor

Gee, there are a lot of recent revisions by a user only identified by IP address "87.69.248.247 ". This person seems to have a strong opinion on the matter and only be interested in this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Earthpsych (talk • contribs) 18:59, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

International?

Elsewhere, Bargh has said: "Free will is a problematic concept because of the word 'free.' People confuse the word 'free will' from 'will.' If someone has a gun held to your head, are you acting freely? No. Since we’re studying causal mechanisms, you can’t say things are free from international causation. I’ve been surprised by my findings every step of the way."

I sought out the source, and the word reported is indeed "international". I can't see that this makes sense, so I suggest we remove this para.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 07:26, 4 July 2018 (UTC).

Revisiting John Bargh + Replication Crisis

Hello, I plan to update parts of John Bargh's article to reflect more recent support of the robust and reliable effect of priming, considering three major published meta-analyses with hundreds of studies included.

Namely, Weingarten et al 2016, "From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally Presented Words", which progresses the narrative of the current wiki article by referencing the same 'failures to directly replicate the phenomenon (Doyen et al., 2012; Harris et al., 2013; Klein et al., 2014; Shanks et al., 2013)' by executing a meta-analysis of 352 published and unpublished effect sizes, obtained from 133 studies, which revealed a small and robust behavioral priming effect.

And then further support for the concept of priming, countering some of the earlier replication challenges can be found also in: Dai et al 2023, "Priming Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Behavioral and Nonbehavioral Primes on Overt Behavioral Outcomes" and Chen et al 2021, "An Enumerative Review and a Meta-Analysis of Primed Goal Effects on Organizational Behavior".

I don't plan to remove the studies which noted a failure to replicate necessarily, considering that the replication challenges John Bargh has faced are also emblematic of the history of the broader replication crisis in psychology. However, it seems evident to me that the article is not balanced as is, and does not take into account the conclusions of the above meta-analyses. It currently reads as concluding that John Bargh's work doesn't replicate.

Also worth noting further commentary on the failed replications, which includes Michael Ramscar's "Why many priming results don’t (and won’t) replicate: A quantitative analysis". The major point notes that Doyen et al in their failed replication of the elderly walking study used low frequency French translations of the original English elderly stereotype primes, amongst other differences from the original experiment.

The current article notes many controversies across Bargh's experiments, but on the flip side only notes one report (in parentheses) of a successful replication by Bargh and Shalev. As opposed to any inclusion of the many successful replications which existed around the time (per Bargh et al 2012, Automaticity in social-cognitive processes: Cesario and Higgins 2005, Hull 2002, Wheeler & Petty 2011...)

In debating which of the above to resolve toward in evaluating the success of priming replications, I defer to the meta-analyses again.

Of course, open to talking before editing! But after some time here, I plan to 'be bold' and make some careful edits to the page, including potentially adding a couple of more recent awards and perhaps updating some of the research section per the last decade. Thank you! Phgubbins (talk) 22:17, 11 January 2024 (UTC)