What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link). From th

What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link). From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently. My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there). It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how. I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent. Thanks for rereading my comment.