Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: In 1955, Adorno attributed antisemitic sentiments voiced by Germans to a paradox projection: The only latently experienced feeling of guilt were warded off by antisemitic defense mechanisms. Similar predictions of increases in antisemitic prejudiced in response to increased Holocaust salience could also be based on other theoretical apparatuses from social identity theory as well as just world theory. Based on the – to our best knowledge –only experimental evidence for such an effect (published in Psychological Science in 2009), the present research reports a series of studies originally conducted to better understand the contribution of the different assumed mechanisms. In light of a failure to replicate the basic effect, however, the studies shifted to an effort to demonstrate the basic process. We report all studies our lab has conducted on the issue. Overall, the data did not provide any evidence for the original effect. In addition to the obvious possibility of an original false positive, we speculate what might be responsible for this conceptual replication failure.