A Comment on Eerland et al. (2016)

People imagine criminal behavior in greater detail and ascribe more blame to criminals when a description of a crime is written using the imperfective verb aspect (Hart & Albarracin, 2011, Experiment 3). An initiative to reproduce these findings conducted by Eerland et al. (2016) yielded a lack of replication. Eerland et al. have suggested that the original effect was likely driven by a Type I error produced by methodological aspects of the experiment, including low sample size. Recent conceptual replications of Hart and Albarracin's effect (Sherrill, Eerland, Zwaan, & Magliano, 2015), however, might imply the effect could be contingent on sample characteristics.