<strong>Original citation:</strong> JJ Exline, RF Baumeister, AL Zell, AJ Kraft, CV Witvliet (2008). Not so innocent: does seeing one's own capacity for wrongdoing predict forgiveness? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: 94.3: 495-515.
<strong>Target of replication:</strong> The finding we wished to reproduce here was that subtle priming (simply asking participants questions about their empathic understanding and personal capability of similar transgressions) can reduce men’s feelings of vengefulness (but not women's). Therefore, we looked for a 2 (priming or no priming) x 2 (gender) interaction of the effect of priming on vengefulness.
<strong>A priori replication criteria:</strong> The power analysis indicates that we need 128 subjects in order to capture an ANOVA interaction effect size η2 = .06 with 4 groups and a numerator df = 1; this will give us a 80% chance of detecting the effect if it indeed exists.
<strong>Materials, Data, and Report Study materials</strong> can be found in the materials component of this project. Raw data and the analysis script can be found in the dataset node. The full report and other materials will appear in the files section of this node upon their completion.
<strong>Conclusions.</strong> Overall, the original findings that thinking about one’s own capability for wrongdoing decreases vengefulness feelings in men failed to replicate. However, there was evidence that thinking about one’s own capability for wrongdoing does lead to more forgiveness. Specifically, being primed with the capability/empathy questions did lead to the predicted pattern of people scoring lower on the unforgiveness scale (TRIM) (M = 2.55, SD = .72) relative to those who viewed the capability/empathy questions after completing the TRIM scale (M = 2.79, SD = .77), F(1,131) = 4.63, p = .03. This did not hold for the vengefulness subscale. Although not a direct replication of study 7, this serves as a theoretical replication of the germane findings of Exline et al. (2007). Interestingly, the original authors did not observe this effect (F = 2.34, η2 = .02).
