Academic Abstract: In the wake of the replication crisis, social and personality psychologists have increased attention to power analysis and the adequacy of sample sizes. In this article, we analyze current controversies in this area, including choosing effect sizes, why and whether power analyses should be conducted on already-collected data, how to mitigate the negative effects of sample size criteria on specific kinds of research, and which power criterion to use. For novel research questions, we advocate that researchers base sample sizes on effects that are likely to be cost-effective for other people to implement (in applied settings) or to study (in basic research settings), given the limitations of interest-based minimums or field-wide effect sizes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe agree with Fitouchi et al. that self-denial is sometimes moralized to signal capacity for cooperation, but propose that a person's cooperative character is more precisely judged by willingness to follow cultural, group, and interpersonal goals, for which many rules can serve as proxies, including rules about abstention. But asceticism is not a moral signal if its aims are destructive, while indulging impulses in a culturally approved way can also signal cooperation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has found a rich lexicon of shame and guilt terms in Chinese, but how comparable these terms are to "shame" or "guilt" in English remains a question. We identified eight commonly used Chinese terms translated as "shame" and "guilt". Study 1 assessed the Chinese terms' intensities, social characteristics, and action tendencies among 40 Chinese speakers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncreased execution of replication studies contributes to the effort to restore credibility of empirical research. However, a second generation of problems arises: the number of potential replication targets is at a serious mismatch with available resources. Given limited resources, replication target selection should be well-justified, systematic and transparently communicated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe project sought to understand the factors which underlie cultural transmission, adapting self-reported methods from cross-cultural psychology and sociology to test the external validity of several constructs from existing evolutionary models. The target population were native-foreigner mixed-couples, allowing the analyses to benefit from asymmetrical cultural inputs. Sampling took place in Italy and Portugal, with recruitment relying on social networks, online newspapers, friends, organizations, universities, parishes, and embassies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRobust scientific knowledge is contingent upon replication of original findings. However, replicating researchers are constrained by resources, and will almost always have to choose one replication effort to focus on from a set of potential candidates. To select a candidate efficiently in these cases, we need methods for deciding which out of all candidates considered would be the most useful to replicate, given some overall goal researchers wish to achieve.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor this Special Issue, I highlight the past and present importance of appraisal theory as well as the challenges to its status as a total theory of emotions from the other functions of emotions: associative learning, self-regulation and social communication. This theoretical view applies both to emotion research in general and the specific fields of my interest in the emotions of moral judgment and intergroup processes. Methodologically, developments in analyses of large and more naturally occurring data sets will give an opportunity to square psychology's structural models of discrete emotions with the more complicated reality that exists.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe suggest three additional improvements to replication practices. First, original research should include concrete checks on validity, encouraged by editorial standards. Second, the reasons for replicating a particular study should be more transparent and balance systematic positive reasons with selective negative ones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Brain Sci
January 2017
Gervais & Fessler assert that contempt is (a) not an emotion (or an attitude) but (b) a sentiment. Here, we challenge the validity and empirical basis of these two assertions, arguing that contempt, like many other emotions, can be both an emotion and a sentiment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo deny others' humanity is one of the most heinous forms of intergroup prejudice. Given evidence that perceiving various forms of complexity in outgroup members reduces intergroup prejudice, we investigated across three experiments whether the novel dimension of emotional complexity, or outgroup members' joint experience of mixed-valence emotions, would also reduce their dehumanisation. Experiment 1 found that perceiving fictitious aliens' experience of the same primary emotions (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies support a link between moral disgust and impurity, whereas anger is linked to harm. We challenged these strict correspondences by showing that disgust is activated in response to information about moral character, even for harm violations. By contrast, anger is activated in response to information about actions, including their moral wrongness and consequences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Gen
January 2017
Over 5 experiments, we test the fictive pass asymmetry hypothesis. Following observations of ethics and public reactions to media, we propose that fictional contexts, such as reality, imagination, and virtual environments, will mitigate people's moral condemnation of harm violations, more so than purity violations. That is, imagining a purely harmful act is given a "fictive pass," in moral judgment, whereas imagining an abnormal act involving the body is evaluated more negatively because it is seen as more diagnostic of bad character.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
July 2016
Guilt is thought to maintain social harmony by motivating reparation. This study compared two methodologies commonly used to identify the neural correlates of guilt. The first, imagined guilt, requires participants to read hypothetical scenarios and then imagine themselves as the protagonist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSexual harassment represents aggressive behavior that is often enacted instrumentally, in response to a threatened sense of masculinity and male identity. To date, however, theoretical attention to the social cognitive processes that regulate workplace harassment is scant. This article presents the development and preliminary validation of the Moral Disengagement in Sexual Harassment Scale (MDiSH); a self-report measure of moral disengagement in the context of hostile work environment harassment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmotion concepts are built through situated experience. Abstract word meaning is grounded in this affective knowledge, giving words the potential to evoke emotional feelings and reactions (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article proposes distinctions between guilt and two forms of shame: Guilt arises from a violated norm and is characterized by a focus on specific behavior; shame can be characterized by a threatened social image (Image Shame) or a threatened moral essence (Moral Shame). Applying this analysis to group-based emotions, three correlational studies are reported, set in the context of atrocities committed by (British) ingroup members during the Iraq war (Ns = 147, 256, 399). Results showed that the two forms of shame could be distinguished.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is currently an unprecedented level of doubt regarding the reliability of research findings in psychology. Many recommendations have been made to improve the current situation. In this article, we report results from PsychDisclosure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
August 2013
The threat of terrorist attacks motivates emotional reactions that elicit functional behavioral responses to characteristics of a threatening group. We argue that the more the group is seen as unjust, the more anger arises, whereas the more it is seen as powerful, the more fear arises. In Experiment 1, British participants read about terrorist groups with varied levels of injustice and power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
October 2013
How are intergroup conciliatory acts (apologies and reparations) evaluated by members of the perpetrator group offering them? This research tests whether these outcomes can be predicted by obligation shifting: the perception that a conciliatory act has shifted the onus away from the perpetrators and onto the victim group. Four experiments in different contexts examined 3 possible outcomes for members of the perpetrator group: satisfaction with the act, negative feelings toward the victims, and support for future assistance. Across all 4 experiments, perceptions of obligation shifting predicted satisfaction with conciliatory acts, as did the perception that the ingroup's image had improved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith the recent upswing in research interest on the moral implications of disgust, there has been uncertainty about what kind of situations elicit moral disgust and whether disgust is a rational or irrational player in moral decision making. We first outline the benefits of distinguishing between bodily violations (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerspect Psychol Sci
November 2012
The current crisis in psychological research involves issues of fraud, replication, publication bias, and false positive results. I argue that this crisis follows the failure of widely adopted solutions to psychology's similar crisis of the 1970s. The untouched root cause is an information-economic one: Too many studies divided by too few publication outlets equals a bottleneck.
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