Started by Valentina Russo (@valentina_r) ·
Thinking, Fast and Slow has a chapter that didn't age well
The 'Florida effect': students who unscrambled words related to old age supposedly walked more slowly afterwards. The book told readers they basically had to accept findings like this. A 2012 replication only found the slower walking when the experimenters expected it.
5 sources · 33 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “thinking fast and slow priming chapter replication”
- Ended at
- Daniel Kahneman
The Trail
- “thinking fast and slow priming chapter replication” (google.com)
- Thinking, Fast and Slow (en.wikipedia.org)
- Priming (psychology) (en.wikipedia.org)
- “bargh elderly priming walking speed doyen 2012 replication” (google.com)
- Daniel Kahneman (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
Kahneman later said he'd put too much faith in small, underpowered studies, and back in 2012 he'd already written an open letter warning priming researchers of a 'train wreck'. The core heuristics-and-biases work in the rest of the book holds up much better.
Keep going
- pretzels are dipped in lye and that's why they're brown · Valentina Russo · 6 sources
- why Japanese train staff point at things and say them out loud · Lin Chen · 4 sources
- H.M., the man who couldn't make new memories · Lin Chen · 6 sources
- it doesn't take 21 days to form a habit · Lin Chen · 5 sources