Daniel Kahneman Sees ‘Train-Wreck Looming’ for Social Psychology
Daniel Kahneman Sees ‘Train-Wreck Looming’ for Social Psychology
Daniel Kahneman sent an e-mail last week to a dozen social psychologists, spelling out what he sees as a way to restore the credibility of priming research. The research, which has found that small cues can cause strong subconscious effects, have come under fire after attempts to replicate some high-profile studies failed. It hasn’t helped that some prominent social psychologists have committed flat-out fraud.
Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winner and author of Thinking Fast and Slow, a section of which is titled “the marvels of priming,” is worried that all of those problems will undermine a field he believes in and will make it difficult for young researchers who study priming to find jobs. “My reason for writing this letter is that I see a train-wreck looming,” he wrote in the e-mail.
That’s why he spelled out a possible solution to the crisis of credibility in his e-mail, first reported by Nature. In it he told social psychologists:
I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess. To deal effectively with the doubts you should acknowledge their existence and confront them straight on, because a posture of defiant denial is self-defeating.
He suggested setting up a “daisy chain” of replication, in which each lab would propose a priming study that another lab would attempt to replicate. Moreover, he wanted labs to select work they considered to be robust, and to have the lab that performed the original study help the replicating lab vet its procedure.
That is just one suggestion, he wrote in the e-mail. The important thing is for social psychologists to “act as a group and avoid defensiveness.”
I talked to Kahneman on the phone on Thursday, while he was waiting to get on a plane. He was upset about the headline on the Nature article that reported his e-mail: “Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act.” He called it “totally inaccurate” and said that, because of the headline, he’s received lots of angry e-mails from psychologists and “may lose some friendships.”