Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: In 1979, Srull and Wyer reported a study where a brief exposure to hostile stimuli caused participants to subsequently rate an individual as being more hostile. Srull and Wyer (1979) went on to be one of the most influential studies in social cognition: It has been cited in over 1,000 academic publications, the “Donald” vignette has been used in dozens of subsequent studies, and the results served as a foundation for subsequent priming studies that extended priming effects beyond the domain of social judgments (e.g., e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). However, a Registered Replication Report (RRR; McCarthy et al., 2018) that contained 26 independent samples and several thousand participants did not find the predicted effect and cast doubt on whether the methods reported by Srull and Wyer would reliably produce a hostile priming effect. However, the RRR deviated from the original methods in a few ways and some criticisms of the methods were raised after the publication of the RRR. The current proposed study is intended to address these criticisms and provide a critical test of whether Srull and Wyer-esque methods can reliably produce a hostile priming effect. The current study will involve several labs who each collect an independent sample of data. Each lab will conduct a close replication of Srull and Wyer (1979) and each lab will pretest stimuli so they can conduct a conceptual replication of Srull and Wyer (1979) using stimuli that are developed specifically for their locally-available participants. Collectively, this study will test the replicability of Srull and Wyer-esque methods to produce a hostile priming effect.