Steve Sailer helps expose the pseudoscience of social psychology:
Okay, but I’ve never seen this explanation offered: successful
priming studies stop replicating after awhile because they basically
aren’t science. At least not in the sense of having discovered something
that will work forever.Instead, to the extent that they ever did really work, they are exercises in marketing. Or, to be generous, art.
And, art wears off.
The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over
time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn’t ready for it, then it
begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to
create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become
widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for
new priming stimuli.For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings),
vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into
the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., “Monet was a rebel,
up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers
up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!”).So, let’s assume for a moment that Bargh’s success in the early 1990s at
getting college students to walk slow wasn’t just fraud or data mining
for a random effect among many effects. He really was priming early
1990s college students into walking slow for a few seconds.Is that so amazing?
I
find it informative that the grand self-appointed defenders of Science
Reason are always focused on the nonexistent enemy of Religion while
showing absolutely no interest in real land of Woo, which is academic
pseudoscience. As a general rule, it is safe to assume that if
midwitted charlatans such as Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond are
basing conclusions upon it, the scientific aspects, to the extent that
they exist at all, will be more than a little shaky.
I
would go so far as to point out that the MAJORITY of what passes for
science today is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It’s not experimental.
It’s not replicable. Despite the credentials attached to it, it has
nothing more to do with science than the proverbial PhD defecating in
the woods. Science is not simply “what scientists do”.