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Marilynne Robinson, on how biblical narratives influenced realist fictions' honoring of "common" human experiences (consciously or unconsciously)

"Goal-priming experiments" - of the sort cited by Malcolm Gladwell - "are coming under scrutiny...." 'A team led by the Belgian cognitive scientist Axel Cleeremans and another at the University of California, San Diego, led by Hal Pashler, repeated the [NYU] slow-walker study and found no difference in the rates of walking between goal-primed and unprimed subjects. 'Mr. Pashler's team also tried without success to replicate a dozen other goal-priming experiments, including one showing that exposure to money made subjects more likely to endorse a free market, and another reporting that exposure to a picture of an American flag prompted subjects to express nationalist attitudes. 'To be sure, a failure to replicate is not confined to psychology, as the Stanford biostatistician John P. A. Ioannidis documented in his much-discussed 2005 article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." The cancer researchers C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis could replicate the findings of only 6 of 53 seminal publications from reputable oncology labs.'