The Lovely Dr. ARINA K. BONES, PhD Strikes Again!

First, we had the groundbreaking Implicit Association Tests to identify the alien and the dead among us.

Now, Dr. ARINA K. BONES, PhD has presented her latest masterwork Do Social Psychologists Cause Priming Research, or Does Priming Research Cause Social Psychologists? (PDF) at the recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Here's Matthew Hutson of Psychology Today, reporting in the Brainstorm blog:

For the first study, they submitted dozens of papers on priming research to top social psychology journal. "The absurdity of the findings were intended to prevent the articles from appearing in print." Nevertheless, all were accepted. This submission process was in itself a way to prime the peers acting as reviewers for the journals by exposing them to priming research. It turns out that the psychologists who reviewed the papers produced more subsequent social psychology research than did other psychologists. It appears that priming research may indeed cause social psychologists.

(Identifying the anonymous reviewers presented a hurdle, which Bones and Gosling overcame by analyzing the reviews for self-references and references to the psychologist Roy Baumeister. "Every human has a unique Baumeister/Self-reference (BS) index, providing a linguistic fingerprint," they write.)

I particularly enjoyed the fictitious journal articles...

Table 1: Examples of Made-up Articles

Chartrand, T. L., Dalton, A. N., Fitzsimons, G. J. (2007). Nonconscious relationship reactance: When significant others prime opposing goals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43,719-726.

Dijksterhuis, A., Preston, J., Wegner, D.M., & Aarts, H. (2008). Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 2-9.

Weinberger, J., & Westen, D. (2008). RATS, we should have used Clinton: Subliminal stimulation in political campaigns. Political Psych, 29, 631-651.

Hassin, R. R., Ferguson, M. J., Shidlovsky, D., & Gross, T. (2007). Waved by invisible flags: The effects of subliminal exposure to flags on political thought and behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 19757-19761.

Data collection is ongoing in Study 2, in which unsuspecting graduate students wear an Unobtrusive Head-Mounted Recorder (EAR) that recites descriptions of priming research at 12 random intervals during the day.

Via @sandygautam.