ABSTRACT
Sherlock Holmes was, of course, a fictional character, so it is hardly surprising that his investigative methods would have come to grief in the real world. In fact his so-called deductions were little more than wild guesses based on slender evidence. The stereotypical psychologist who unerringly sizes people up at a glance turns out to be as fictional as Sherlock Holmes. Take the pioneer of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud. The decision that participants had to make was not, as in an earlier task, whether the target words were pleasant or unpleasant, but rather whether target words were consistent with a cue. The researchers surmised that the Modern Racism Scale, in virtue of tapping racist sentiments more obliquely, might evoke more honest responding, and therefore correlate better with the results of the sequential priming task.
