The term 'priming' is used to refer to a wide range of different changes in perception, judgment, and behavior that can be elicited by giving people a relatively minimal exposure to words, pictures, or other stimuli. Some types of priming effects are undoubtedly robust. Within the cognitive literature, one of the most widely investigated forms of priming is produced by having participants read a prime word and then try to classify a target letter string as a word or nonword. When the prime is related to the target string (e.g., when the prime is 'doctor' and the target is 'nurse') people respond more quickly [1]. Similarly, semantically related primes make people more accurate in naming briefly flashed target words [2]. These forms of perceptual priming effects (as well as others involving memory retrieval, e.g., McKoon & Ratcliff [3]) have been directly replicated many times. Such replications often have involved statistically powerful experiments, using within-subject comparisons with many trials collected for each participant in each of the experimental conditions.

Perceptual versus Social/Goal Priming

The function and mechanism of the perceptual priming effects described in the previous paragraph seem relatively straightforward. Signal detection analysis shows that these priming effects reflect a perceptual bias toward assuming that target information is consistent with the prime [2,4,5], see 6 for discussion. From a Bayesian perspective, this type of bias mechanism may be a rational accommodation to a tendency for conceptually related things of all kinds to occur in close temporal proximity (cf. Huber, Shiffrin, Quach & Lyle [7]). A bias effect may arise by a simple mechanism of spreading activation in a network through which the representations of related things are highly connected (cf. Morton [8]).

Within the past 15 years or so, a more varied set of priming effects have been described in the literature. These effects involve changes in attitudes, performance level, choices of behavior, and motivational states--often apparently activating goals consonant with the content of the priming materials. For example, studies have reported effects such as reading words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly as they exit the lab [9] while reading words related to money causes people to volunteer less of their time [10]. Other work has reported that seeing an American flag makes participants who are US residents report more politically conservative views when asked eight months later [11] and that plotting two closely spaced points on graph paper causes people to feel closer to their friends and family [12].

While it is common to refer to all the things described thus far as "priming", in fact there are some important differences between the social and goal priming studies just mentioned, and the perceptual priming effects discussed earlier. One difference is that whereas the perceptual priming effects have been directly replicated many times, direct replication attempts involving the social and goal priming literature appear to be relatively infrequent (cf. Yong [13]). Secondly, many of the direct replication attempts of which we are aware have failed to confirm social and goal priming effects (e.g. [14–17], for more general discussions, see 13,18). It is well known that positive results are far more likely to be published than negative results (the file drawer problem [19]). Thus, it is at least possible that the reported failures to replicate could conceivably reflect only the visible aspect of a more pervasive problem of replicability relating to goal priming. Third, whereas the function of perceptual priming seems easy to understand, as mentioned above, the functional purpose achieved by higher-level priming effects are less obvious (although see Dijksterhuis & Aarts [20], for a different perspective). If reading words is sufficient to activate concepts, and this automatically changes people’s selection of goals and actions, it would seem to open them up to potentially disadvantageous influences. Moreover, if the phenomenon is true, it would appear to have important practical implications, given the ease with which effects are purportedly achieved and in some cases, the reported long-term influence of these manipulations (e.g., Carter et al. [11]).

Finally, the difference between social/goal priming and perceptual priming that is perhaps most interesting is that--if judged from the published research alone--one would conclude that the effect size for social/goal priming as measured with Cohen’s d (which scales the effect against variability in the study population) may actually be larger. Pashler et al. [15] performed an unsystematic examination of some well-known goal priming studies and found effect sizes in the range of d=0.5 to d=1 (commonly labeled as large effects.) Effect sizes in the perceptual priming literature are harder to estimate from published data because the prime is manipulated within subject with repeated measures and eta-squared is the commonly reported effect size, which is not comparable to measures like Cohen’s d that scale effects against the variability between people in the population. However, Pashler et al. [15] reanalyzed perceptual priming data from Yap, Balota and Tan [21] and found an effect size of only d=.06. (This may or may not be representative of perceptual priming studies generally.) It is odd that social/goal priming effects would be stronger than perceptual priming effects, given the fact that the latter are normally assumed to reflect far more direct pathways (bias due to spreading activation; but see Ratcliff & McKoon [22]). Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn [23] have provided another reason for skepticism about the large effect sizes reported in the social/goal priming literature, pointing out that even quite "obvious" behavioral science effects (such as the tendency of people who like eggs to eat egg salad more often than other people) turn out, when properly measured, to be quite small (i.e., d < .5).

Thus, it seems at least possible that the social and goal priming literature might contain many large observed effects due to numerous false alarms. This could occur if a great number of small underpowered experiments have been conducted, with only those results reaching significance having been published [24,25].

The points raised above merely argue that some open-minded skepticism about social and goal priming effects may be in order--they obviously do not support any stronger conclusions than that. It is only by direct replication attempts that the validity of specific findings can be assessed. The present article contains the third in a series of direct replication attempts conducted in our lab looking at the replicability of influential social and goal priming results (other groups are engaged in similar efforts; see Bower [26].

The current paper attempts to replicate work from Bargh et al. [27] – a paper that has been extremely influential, having been cited well over a 1100 times according to Google Scholar, with more than 100 of these citations occurring just within 2012. Bargh and colleagues theorized that exposure to high achievement words would activate an unconscious goal to perform well in participants. In support of this hypothesis, they found that participants who were primed in such a way performed better on subsequent word search tasks. Here we report two attempts to directly replicate experiments from Bargh et al. [27]. In both experiments, we try to follow as closely as possible the methods and materials used in the original work, while also keeping experimenters blind to condition in order to be sure that results were not influenced by experimenter expectancy effects. (The purpose of the current paper was to examine whether the effects of unconscious high-performance-goal primes reported by Bargh and colleagues would replicate. Therefore, we focused our replication attempts on the first two experiments from Bargh et al. that directly pertain to this. Given our failure to find any hint of the purported priming effects, we did not attempt to replicate the additional experiments reported in Bargh et al.)

It should be noted that the large literature on social and goal priming effects contains other reports of different sorts of priming manipulations increasing achievement, in addition to the effect being examined in the present article (e.g., [28–30], see also Dijksterhuis & Aarts [20], for a general review).