# Professor priming - or not

This was my first contribution to a Registered Replication Report (RRR). Being one of 40 participating labs was an interesting exercise – it might seem straightforward to run the same study in different labs, but we learned that such small things as ü, ä and ö can generate a huge amount of problems and work (read this if you are into these kind of things).

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Here is one of the central results:
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<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-579" src="/uploads//2017/11/Screen-Shot-2017-11-13-at-22.19.39.png" alt="" width="718" height="609" srcset="2017/11/Screen-Shot-2017-11-13-at-22.19.39.png 718w, 2017/11/Screen-Shot-2017-11-13-at-22.19.39-300x254.png 300w, 2017/11/Screen-Shot-2017-11-13-at-22.19.39-589x500.png 589w, 2017/11/Screen-Shot-2017-11-13-at-22.19.39-500x424.png 500w" sizes="(max-width: 718px) 100vw, 718px" />
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So overall not a lot of action &#8230; our lab was actually the one with larges effect size (in the predicted direction).
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Here is the abstract of the whole paper and here the <a href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/redesign/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Dijksterhuis_RRRcommentary_ACPT.pdf">Commentary by Ap Dijksterhuis</a> naturally, he sees things a bit different:           Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with an intelligent category (“professor”) subsequently performed 13.1% better on a trivia test than participants primed with an unintelligent category (“soccer hooligans”). Two unpublished replications of this study by the original authors, designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, observed a smaller difference between conditions (2-3%) as well as a gender difference: men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%) but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multi-lab Registered Replication Report (RRR). A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, with 23 laboratories meeting all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic result of those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493) of the updated version of the original study, examining the difference between priming with professor and hooligan on a 30-item general knowledge trivia task (a supplementary analysis reports results with all 40 labs, N = 6,454). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with professor and those primed with hooligan (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.
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##### Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck
###### Associate Professor

I study human decision making, process tracing methods, food choice and traffic behavior.