COGNITION, INTELLIGENCE, REPLICATIONS, SOCIALMarch 26, 2018

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 “game”). The field became animated by so-called “social priming” claims, like
John Bargh’s classic study that suggested priming the concept of elderliness led participants
to walk away from the lab more slowly (a finding that other labs failed to replicate, helping
to spark the so-called replication crisis in psychology).

Amidst this crisis, until now the Professor Prime finding – perhaps the kingpin of these
effects – was still standing (even if lampooned by, among others, the Dr Primestein Twitter
account). The effect became the focus of this latest mass replication attempt (known as a
“registered replication report”) when, in a great example of collaborative science,
Dijksterhuis and Van Knippenberg volunteered their study as the latest to face scrutiny.

Prior to releasing their original materials to the other participating labs, Dijksterhuis and
Van Knippenberg re-ran their own study and found a smaller effect than they had
previously, and one that was confined to male participants.
The procedure followed by the other 40 labs was almost identical to the original, except
they used a new set of 30 trivia questions pretested to ensure a useful range of difficulty.
Unlike the original, they also preregistered their stopping conditions (at what point they
would cease looking for further participants; selective stopping is a questionable research
practice that can lead to misrepresentation of experimental effects). The labs also aimed for
a gender balance between participants, which only 23 of them achieved.

Whereas the original study showed a 13 per cent advantage to participants who got the
Professor Prime, the average effect achieved by 23 labs involving over 5,500 participants
found an advantage of just 0.014 per cent – almost 100 times weaker – and the variability
across studies meant that this tiny effect was not statistically significant. Restricting the
analysis to only male participants made no difference, and when the data from all 40 labs
was included (i.e. also including those with a gender bias in their sample), the effect was
even smaller.

The only hint of an effect came after the researchers excluded anyone who thought the
priming task was in any way linked to the trivia task – which was two thirds of the
participants – in which case the Professor Prime was associated with a 2 per cent
advantage. This is still much smaller than the original and there must be doubts about the
meaningfulness of a small effect that is present only in a minority of people.

There is no way to see this as anything other than yet another serious blow to the social
priming literature. But it’s also a success for non-adversarial science – an example of
psychology cleaning up its issues and coming to a better understanding of the effects that
matter enough for us to investigate further.

—Registered Replication Report: Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998)

Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest