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It's really weird when you hear people saying things like:

> disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.

It's as if they know they're wrong, but are trying to force themselves to believe it any way.

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I think that is quite harsh on Kahneman, especially considering how reasonable he sounds in the open letter that is linked. But I am also completely perplexed as to how he was so confident about these priming studies given the research on cognitive biases that he's so well-known for (as mentioned in the article).

A great deal of his fame is premised on this priming effect. It’s been taken almost as gospel for decades, to the point that a typical applied psychology paper will actually include a priming step even if unnecessary just to spruce up the methodology. E.g. “subjects were primed by having them read articles on spicy food” for a study on water fountains, etc.

Oh, wow. Is any of his research still taken seriously? For whatever reason, I was under the impression his work on researcher bias like "the law of small numbers" was quite influential and still cited here and there by trustworthy figures.

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