Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Van Bavel, J. J., & Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 110-125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.06.007
DECISION: Minor Errors
that do not affect the core conclusions
Reviewer: Øystein Sørensen, University of Oslo
Author response: Mina Cikara, Harvard University
Recommender: Jamie Cummins, University of Bern
Decision & Recommendation
Based on the reviewer’s report and the authors’ response, I return the decision that the original article contains Minor Errors that do not affect the core conclusions. That is, errors that have the benefit of being detectable thanks to the presence and sharing of research materials, but whose scope and implications are minor. The reviewer reproduced the principal mixed-model results after updating/repairing the SAS code; discrepancies that remain are limited to reporting and rounding issues, effect-size computation differences for reported Cohen’s ds, and a denominator degrees-of-freedom typo. A decision of minor errors entails the publication of the report, authors response, and recommendation on the ERROR website (error.reviews). The authors are also asked that they recognise the minor errors associated with their manuscript in future discussions of their article. We commend the authors in already taking action to publicly acknowledge and rectify the errors found here, specifically by committing to posting cleaned data and functioning code to OSF. A highly-cited paper which was not computationally reproducible ~1 year ago now has clean, working, openly-available code thanks to the efforts of the reviewer and the author.
The report, author response, and recommendation have been posted on the ERROR website (https://error.reviews/reviews/cikara-et-al-2014/), and as a preprint on PsyArXiv (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nqkvg_v1).
Cite as: ERROR. (2025). Error review of Cikara et al. (2014). Version 1. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nqkvg_v1
