Hypothesis
Exposure to achievement-related words activates a high-performance goal that improves performance on a demanding cognitive task.
What failed
A direct replication (n = 98) found no effect of priming, with means in the opposite direction to the original; a second experiment adding the five-minute delay between priming and test that the original authors said enhanced the effect also found no evidence of priming (n = 66).
Broken assumption
Achievement words reliably activate a performance goal strong enough to change behaviour.
Why
The authors offer no mechanism and argue instead that the goal-priming literature, cited well over 1100 times for this paper alone, needs sceptical scrutiny.
From the published paper: Harris et al. PLoS ONE, 2013. ↗CC BY