Peer Review of "Experiment and Fail"

Abstract

Introduction The paper ‘Alcohol cues and aggressive thoughts’ reports a failed attempt at reproducing two experiments. The massive shortcomings of the reported reproduction are obvious. For a moment I was tempted to think that the authors, in the form of a standard psychological paper, were presenting a philosophical critique of this type of experiments. In my comment I will try to formulate such a critique in a more straightforward manner. I will first give a brief and plain description of what happened in the experiment and why it was done, according to the authors. Then I will say a few things about the complexity of producing and reproducing experiments in general, followed by a section on the problems of the specific type of experiments of which this one is a specimen: priming studies, mostly found in the subdiscipline of social psychology and since almost a decade the subject of a vigorous debate among methodologists, philosophers of science, priming researchers, in scientific journals, but also in newspapers, magazines, blogs and on Twitter. I will end with assessing the possibilities and the limits of doing experiments in the human sciences: what can we learn from experiments on alcohol cues if we want to tackle physical, mental and social harm, attributed to the consumption of alcohol?