John Bargh
Article
John Bargh is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 15, 2022 and August 31, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “bottom tier stuff like Dan Ariley and John Bargh”; “consider John Bargh’s famous (and now debunked) social priming studies”. It most often appears alongside 2012, Adam Smith, Against Automaticity.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 15, 2022
- Last seen: August 31, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 2012 (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- Against Automaticity (1 shared issues)
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- As I Lay Dying (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (1 shared issues)
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- Authority (1 shared issues)
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- autistic reductionists (1 shared issues)
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- Banana (1 shared issues)
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- Barack Obama (1 shared issues)
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- based and blackpilled (1 shared issues)
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- Bentham (1 shared issues)
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- Bernie (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
These might seem like damning criticisms but they’re really not. Nothing in this vein is free from the stain of the replication crisis. If you threw out every book that referenced even just the absolute bottom tier stuff like Dan Ariley and John Bargh, you wouldn’t have a discipline left. This whole discipline is crawling out of a huge hole of fraud, wishful thinking, and appalling lack of rigour. People like Haidt, even though I may be quite sceptical of his category formation, are broadly pulling it upward. It makes thinking about this area hard but it does not make it impossible or useless.
For example, consider John Bargh’s famous (and now debunked) social priming studies: an experimenter would make subjects solve word games related to elderly people (eg WRINKLE, OLD, CANE). These subjects would then walk out of the laboratory more slowly than control subjects, because they’d been “primed” with the thought of old people, who move slowly. Again, this has since been debunked. But for a while, it seemed like half of all psych experiments were something along these lines. And they all sent the same message: “you” are not in command. You are like a leaf, being blown about by environmental factors beyond your control - how people phrase things, what your peers are doing, and which words you’ve encountered recently.