Trouble at the lab
Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not
“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Trouble at the lab”
Briefing
October 19th 2013
From the October 19th 2013 edition
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