This was simply an error

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 28. 

Other priming studies haven’t done much better. One claimed that participants who were primed with ‘distance’ – by having them plot two points far apart on a piece of graph paper – were more likely to feel ‘distant’ from their friends and relatives; it failed to replicate in 2012.  Another study claimed that when written moral dilemmas were printed with a surrounding checkerboard pattern, participants made more polarised judgements, because the pattern made them think of the concept ‘black and white’; this failed to replicate in 2018.  On a similar topic, a line of research that claimed that you can make people more morally judgemental by priming their disgust was thrown into doubt by a review in 2015.
 
To give Kahneman his due, he later admitted that he’d made a mistake in overemphasising the scientific certainty of priming effects. ‘The experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it,’ he commented six years after the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow. ‘This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm … but I did not think it through.’  But the damage had already been done: millions of people had been informed by a Nobel Laureate that they had ‘no choice’ but to believe in those studies. 

Boy that was a whirlwind of absurd findings.  And all in less than ten years.