A Multi-Site Collaborative Study of the Hostile Priming Effect

• DOI: 10.1525/collabra.18738
• Publication Date: 2021-02-11T02:09:07Z
• Authors: Randy McCarthy; Will Gervais; Balazs Aczel; Rosemary L. Al-Kire; Mark Aveyard; Silvia Marcella B...; Lemi Baruh; Charlotte Basch; Anna Baumert; Anna Behler; Ann Bettencourt; Adam Bitar; Hugo Bouxom; Ashley Buck; Zeynep Cemalcilar; Peggy Chekroun; Jacqueline M. Chen; Ángel del Fresno-...; Alec Ducham; John E. Edlund; Amanda ElBassiouny; Thomas Rhys Evans; Patrick J. Ewell; Patrick S. Forscher; Paul T. Fuglestad; Lauren Hauck; Christopher E. Hawk; Anthony D. Hermann; Bryon Hines; Mukunzi Irumva; Lauren N. Jordan; Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba; Catherine Haley; Pavol Kačmár; Murat Kezer; Robert Körner; Muriel Kosaka; Marton Kovacs; Elicia C. Lair; Jean-Baptiste Légal; Dana C. Leighton; Michael W. Magee; Keith Markman; Marcel Martončik; Martin Müller; Jasmine B. Norman; Jerome Olsen; Danielle Oyler; Curtis E. Phills; Gianni Ribeiro; Alia Rohain; John Sakaluk; Astrid Schütz; Daniel Toribio-Fl...; Jo-Ann Tsang; Michela Vezzoli; Caitlin Williams; Guillermo B. Willis; Jason Young; Cristina Zogmaister
• Keywords: social judgments; replication; 150; Replication; social priming; hostile perceptions; Crowdsourcing; Hostile attributions; Hostile perceptions; Priming; Replication; Social judgments; Social priming;; Collaboration; hostile attributions; hostile perceptions; social priming; social judgments; replication; hostile attributions; priming; crowdsourcing; [SHS.PSY] Humanities and Social Sciences/Psychology; Hostile attributions; Crowdsourcing; Hostile attributions; Hostile perceptions; Priming; Replication; Social judgments; Social priming; Social priming; Priming; Crowdsourcing; Hostile perceptions; Psychology; crowdsourcing; Social judgments; priming

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).