As someone who used priming heavily at Google, and its wide use in social networks to billions in revenue. I’m gonna go with the academics trying to take this down are BS.
Adam Curtis even suggests lightly that the takedown of priming in academia was paid for to bury its actual effectiveness (and liability by implication)
priming obviously works. it is inherent in the physical structure of the brain. nerve endings from various all over the body terminate in different physical locations in the brain, and then these are interlinked in an adaptive biological mesh network. nerve responses are triggered by cascades of correlated impulses across different nerve endings, so at a physical level a strongly correlated signal from any two major nerve groups will trigger a sympathetic response when one of them fires independently. the experiments that social scientists come up with may be flawed, but this is definitely how my brain works, so i don't need a study to prove it.
Yes, there is a sort of blindness in science. The idea that if something hasn't been proven it's not true.
The reproducibility crisis reproducibility crisis?