SPRING ISU RESEARCH METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY CREP - REPLICATION PROJECT: EMPATHY AVOIDANCE, Ames, Iowa, March 2026

We are completing this replication as a part of a group project in our research methods in psychology class at Iowa State University. The purpose of this current research is to investigate the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the findings of the study by Cameron and colleagues’ (2019) through a replication. Cameron and colleagues (2019) were interested in whether participants who perceived empathy as cognitively taxing would avoid choosing to behave empathetically without any other extraneous factors present –such as monetary, time, or emotional impacts. The specific aim of this replication study is to investigate a potential association between when a person is presented a choice to avoid empathy and perceived cognitive effort needed to behave empathetically. Empathy is considered a virtue, yet people often avoid empathy. Why is this so? Our undergraduate research methods class (PSYCH 3020) at Iowa State University is conducting a replication project of a published study that offered an answer to this question, organized through the Collaborative Replications and Education Project (CREP). The goal is to teach research methods while simultaneously having students engage in actual research that will be published with data collected from other replication sites. Our class is conducting a replication of the first study that appears in Cameron, Scheffer, Hadjiandreou, Hutcherson, Ferguson, and Inzlict (2019). The class consists of 18 undergraduate students, led by Professor Tess Neal and Graduate Teaching Assistant Maya Irvin-Vitela. The course is designed such that every student is engaged in writing a research paper reporting on our replication project, writing an ethics proposal for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, doing a preregistration through the Open Science Framework (OSF), and making an academic poster and presentation based on the project. As a class, we use the jigsaw method to combine work done by individual students into whole single projects (e.g., a single collaboratively written IRB proposal that we actually submit for approval, a single version of a collaboratively-written preregistration that we'll actually submit and use). Our OSF project page, which publicly documents our process, progress, and outcomes, is: https://osf.io/vay9k