A Lack of Seasonal Warmth

Christopher F. Chabris, Patrick R. Heck, Jaclyn Mandart, Daniel J. Benjamin, and Daniel J. Simons, ‘No Evidence that Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth: Two Failures to Replicate Williams and Bargh (2008)’, Social Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000361 , open access pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/mvn9b.

In my last post I tried out a way of thinking about the replication crisis in psychology from a literary critic’s perspective. If social psychology is a very human science, I wondered, maybe inconstancy is inevitable, something to be understood as part of the conversation between experts trying to understand the mind. I didn’t end up satisfied with this attempt. It’s obviously not an appealing foundation for the scientists I talk to (I wouldn’t really dare to bring it up with more than a couple); the parsimonious way that conclusions are drawn and maintained is vital.
      And then today I read about this latest failed attempt to reproduce a famous finding in social psychology. Williams and Bargh found that physical warmth was associated with emotional warmth — specifically, that carrying a cup of coffee made subjects more positively disposed to new people. This finding makes intuitive and evolutionary sense (I mean: meet my cat, he really loves us in winter) but it’s also disarmingly counter-intuitive in the way it exposes what might be some very simple wiring in the embodied mind. And it’s very suggestive for literature too.
      Except… Chabris et al., in an essay that is critical about various aspects of the original experiments (sample size; statistical emphasis), report that they were unable to achieve the same results in a re-run of the experiment. Although a part of me is still thinking very slightly ‘yes but yes but yes but’, and wondering about when there’ll be a rejoinder from the warmed-up side of the debate, this feels like another palpable hit in this process.
      Shut-down until the New Year now — happy festive times to all — and then in 2019 it’s time to get properly stuck in to the subjective experience of remembering, flagged as a new direction in the annual round-up, not yet acted upon.

E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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