On the Replicability of the Affective Priming Effect in the Pronunciation Task

The results of a nearly exact replication of Bargh et al.'s (1996) Experiment 2 failed to detect the affective priming effect.

Abstract

Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, and Hymes (1996) and Hermans, De Houwer, and Eelen (1994) showed that a valenced target word is pronounced faster after the presentation of an affectively related prime word than after the presentation of an affectively unrelated prime word. This finding is important because it provides crucial evidence for the hypotheses that stimulus evaluation (a) is goal-independent and (b) facilitates the encoding of stimuli that have the same valence. However, recent studies indicate that the affective priming effect is not a reliable finding in the standard pronunciation task. We report the results of a nearly exact replication of Bargh et al.'s (1996) Experiment 2. In line with previous replication studies, we failed to detect the affective priming effect.