The link between Empathy and Forgiveness: Replication and extensions of McCullough et al. (1997)'s Study 1use asterix (*) to get italics

Chan Chi Fung, Gilad Feldman Please use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"

2023

<p>[IMPORTANT: Abstract, method, and results were written using a randomized dataset produced by Qualtrics to simulate what these sections will look like after data collection. These will be updated following the data collection. For the purpose of the simulation, we wrote things in past tense, but no pre-registration or data collection took place yet.]</p> <p>The empathy model of forgiveness conceptualized forgiving as an empathy-facilitated motivational change that leads to reductions in the motivation to behave in relationship -destructive ways and increases in the motivation to behave in relationship-constructive ways toward an offender. In a Replication Registered Report with a US American Prolific sample (N = TBD), we replicated Study 1 from McCullough et al. (1997) with extensions manipulating empathy to determine causality and measuring revenge motivation adopted from McCullough et al. (1998).</p> <p>[The following findings are simulated random noise and will be updated after data collection:]</p> <p>We found no support for affective empathy of the wronged person as associated with perceived apology (r = 0.08, 95% CI [-0.03, 0.18]) or with forgiveness toward the offender (r = -0.02, 95% CI [-0.13, 0.08]). In terms of behavioral motivations, we found no support for forgiveness as associated with avoidance motivation (r = 0.01, 95% CI [-0.11, 0.12]) or with revenge motivation (r = -0.01, 95% CI [-0.12, 0.09]). We found no support for an association between conciliatory motivation and forgiveness (r = -0.01, 95% CI [-0.11, 0.10]). Extending the replication by manipulating empathy, we could not find a significant difference in forgiveness among the three empathy conditions, η2p &lt; 0.01, 90% CI [0.00, 0.01]. We therefore cannot conclude a genuine casual relationship between affective empathy and forgiveness toward an offender. Overall, we found [weak to no] empirical support for the empathy model of forgiveness. All materials, data, and code were made available on: https://osf.io/fmuv2/&nbsp;​</p>

forgiveness, empathy, apology, motivational change, relationship, registered report, replication

NonePlease indicate the methods that may require specialised expertise during the peer review process (use a comma to separate various required expertises).

Social sciences

2023-01-25 11:15:13

Chris Chambers

Wenrui Cao, James Bartlett