The great replicability mystery of ‘social priming’ in psychology (Nature 576, 200–202; 2019) turns out to reflect a mundane fact: priming studies (social or non-social) that use reliable methods are highly replicable, whereas those that don’t are not. In our view, it is time to dispense with the term once and for all.

Social priming occurs when exposure to a social concept or stimulus affects later behaviour. One problem is that there is no clear social component to much of what is defined as social priming (in priming with numbers or the idea of death, for example). And many studies that are obviously social (such as priming with stereotypes) are excluded.

Furthermore, those studies identified as social priming almost exclusively collect a single response to a single prime per subject, whereas others that collect hundreds of responses to multiple primes are excluded from analyses of social priming. Thus, social-priming studies have less power to detect real effects and are more prone to false positives.

Dozens of priming effects using social stimuli are designed to observe multiple behaviours and are highly replicable. But when a non-social priming study measures only a single response per subject, the effects are — unsurprisingly — weak and unreliable (see A. M. Rivers and J. W. Sherman Preprint at PsyArXiv http://doi.org/dng4; 2018).