Abstract

MARTINS, Ana Cristina. O pensamento contrafactual e a percepção de crimes: revisitando Macrae, Milne e Griffiths (1993)... . Aná. Psicológica [online]. 2003, vol.21, n.3, pp.393-406. ISSN 0870-8231.

Macrae, Milne and Griffiths (1993) developed two studies in order to analyse the effect of counterfactual thought on crimes' perception. They manipulated counterfactual alternative proximity (Study 1) and antecedent's normality (Study 2) in the scenario. However, they didn't measure participants' thoughts. They just inferred indirectly counterfactuals' effects from crimes' evaluations. We proposed to replicate Macrae et al.'s (1993) Study 2 measuring participants' thoughts. We expected in exceptional condition participants to generate a greater number of counterfactuals, to percept the crime as more serious, to recommend a more severe punishment to the perpetrator and do exhibit a more sympathy toward the victim. Results have infirmed all our hypotheses, not corroborating authors' findings. Anchoring on the explication that these divergences were done to our introduction of counterfactuals' measure, we've conducted a second study that was the «integral» replication of original work. Again, we didn't reproduce Macrae et al's (1993) results. General discussion is established around the model of counterfactual thought generation (Roese & Olson, 1995), the role of the participants' gender and the ways to measure counterfactuals by listing them. We also pose several methodological advertencies as well as new investigation questions in the domain.

Keywords : Counterfactual thought; crime perception; events' normality.

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