Professor John A. Bargh, a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University, gives a lesson on how to respond when rivals publish a paper that criticizes your work. Writing in the prestigious magazine Psychology Today, Professor Bargh explains:
Scientific integrity in the era of pay-as-you-go publications and superficial online science journalism.
[There is] a recent article titled “Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?” by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans. The researchers reported that they could not replicate our lab’s 1996 finding…
The Doyen et al. article appeared in an online journal, PLoS ONE, which quite obviously does not receive the usual high scientific journal standards of peer-review scrutiny… Although the essentially self-published nature of the Doyen et al. article is bad enough, the misleading conclusions it drew were made even worse by the publicity given to them…
Psychology Today reports that Professor Bargh is “fascinated by the existential questions of… personal responsibility.”
BONUS: Other people’s views of PLoS ONE
BONUS: Professor Bargh co-authored this study:
Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., Lee-Chai, A. Y., Barndollar, K., & Troetschel, R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014 – 1027.