One place the criticisms here are bordering on unfair is in mentioning the study's assumptions without mentioning how they're based on previous work. For exampl

One place the criticisms here are bordering on unfair is in mentioning the study's assumptions without mentioning how they're based on previous work. For example, the use of fancy cars as a proxy for higher social status, or the use of a self-reported assessment of social status, are not arbitrary—the authors justify them with references to previous work that presumably established those techniques. Maybe that earlier work is bad; one would have to read it to know. But it's legitimate for experimenters to build on earlier work by pointing to it rather than inlining it. Similarly, the experiments where subjects were asked to imagine things about their social status or about greed are based on a huge amount of earlier work on priming. That is by now an established experimental paradigm, and the authors clearly assume their audience knows about it [1]. That also is legitimate for a scientific paper. To criticize the paradigm, one should find flaws in the work that established it, not work that seeks to build on it. So the comments along the lines of "how could this paper ever have passed peer review" seem to me not to hold up very well. You can extract details from most any experiment and make them seem absurd. It's true that the interpretation of these particular findings is greatly open to question, but that's no reason not to publish them when they're both interesting and statistically significant. On the other hand, the paper clearly doesn't substantiate the enormous claim in its title. It's hard to imagine how any one paper could. Apparently peer-reviewed journals do linkbait too. [1] Or rather, that's how I read the paper. I don't know enough to say whether this is true.