Fifteen years ago, social psychology was in its pomp. It was the hottest thing in the social sciences, ubiquitous in TED Talks and on best-seller lists. Tiny, targeted, and experimentally tested changes to behavior seemed to carry a utopian promise of making life better for people as well as improving society as a whole. These “nudges” and “life hacks” found their way out of the classroom and conference hall and into the corporate boardroom and the White House. The TED Talk by Amy Cuddy, a former professor at Harvard Business School, on “power poses” racked up 74 million views on YouTube. President Obama told Vanity Fair that he only wore gray and blue suits to cut down on decision fatigue, an idea that was itself an outgrowth of the research into ego depletion. Cass R. Sunstein, director of the behavioral economics and public-policy program at Harvard Law, was serving as Obama’s head of information and regulatory affairs, bringing his ideas about decision architecture to the heart of government.
Fast-forward to the present, and social psychology appears to be a field in crisis. Classic studies won’t replicate. Academic superstars keep being accused of research fraud. Things have gotten bad enough that some have begun asking whether psychology is a science at all, in the Kuhnian sense of a coherent research program amassing a cumulative body of knowledge, or just a scattered bunch of research subjects in search of a paradigm.
Ruth Leys, a historian of science at the Johns Hopkins University who has spent her career writing about the development of psychiatry, psychology, and the associated sciences of the mind, belongs to this group of doubters. Her new book, Anatomy of a Train Wreck: The Rise and Fall of Priming Research, chronicles the meteoric ascent and swift collapse of one particular subfield of social psychology. Leys sees priming research — the study of how subtle cues can subliminally shape our thoughts and behaviors — as a microcosm of what has gone wrong in psychological research in the past generation. However, unlike many of those who have weighed in on psychology’s post-replication crisis reckoning, she doesn’t focus on experimental design or malfeasance. Rather, for Leys, the problem with the current state of psychology is not bad methods but bad ideas. Chief among these is the dangerous notion of automaticity, or the idea that most of human behavior isn’t intentionally willed but derived from unconscious responses to stimuli.