Sorry, but imagining you ’re a professor won’t make you smarter (an unsuccessful mass replication of the Professor Prime effect)

It’s another blow for “social priming” but a success for non-adversarial science By Alex Fradera A pre-registered mass replication attempt published in Perspectives on Psychological Science has raised doubts about another celebrated psychology finding. The collaboration between 40 laboratories found scant evidence for the so-called “Professor Prime”, undermining the famous finding that when people imagined themselves as a professor rather than a football hooligan it led them to perform better on a trivia quiz. In the original study, published in 1998, the Dutch researchers Ap Dijksterhuis and Daan Van Knippenberg asked participants to spend five minutes writing about themselves as if they were a professor or a football hooligan, thus priming them with one concept or the other. Next, the participants completed an unrelated trivia test of twenty questions, and those primed with the professor concept achieved an average of two and a half more correct answers  – a 13 per cent advantage – versus those in the hooligan condition. The authors concluded that “priming a stereotype or trait leads to complex overt behavior in line with this activated stereotype or trait”. This was part of an exciting new wave of research that moved beyond earlier priming studies that had focused on how “primes” make it easier to recognise related concepts (e.g. encountering the prime word “football” makes us quicker to recognise related words like “goal” or ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Intelligence Replications Social Source Type: blogs