Bøker av Ruth Leys

A history of "priming" research that analyzes the field's underlying assumptions and experimental protocols to shed new light on a contemporary crisis in social psychology. In 2012, a team of Belgian scientists reported that they had been unable to replicate a canonical experiment in the field of psychology known as "priming." The original experiment, performed by John Bargh in the nineties, purported to show that words connoting old age unconsciously influenced--or primed--research subjects, causing them to walk more slowly. When researchers could not replicate these results, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warned of "a train wreck looming" if Bargh and his colleagues could not address doubts about their work. Since then, the inability to replicate other well-known priming experiments has helped precipitate an ongoing debate over what has gone wrong in psychology, raising fundamental questions about the soundness of research practices in the field. Anatomy of a Train Wreck offers the first detailed history of priming research from its origins in the early 1980s to its recent collapse. Ruth Leys places priming experiments in the context of contemporaneous debates not only over the nature of automaticity but also the very foundations of social psychology. While these latest discussions about priming have largely focused on methodology--including sloppy experimental practices, inadequate statistical methods, and publication bias--Leys offers a genealogy of the theoretical expectations and scientific paradigms that have guided and motivated priming research itself. Examining the intellectual strategies of scientists, their responses to criticism, and their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, Anatomy of a Train Wreck raises crucial questions about the evidence surrounding unconscious influence and probes the larger stakes of the replication crisis: psychology's status as a science.

Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "e;survivor syndrome."e; Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.