Registered replication report: Hart & Albarracín (2011)

Abstract

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people’s mental representations of situations. Forexample, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as adynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what aperson did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we thinkabout a person’s intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as beingmore intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The factthat this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replicationattempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replicationstudies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of thiseffect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0and −0.24) or imagery (d = −0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results andthose of the original study.