Rael Dawtry

Who they are

This page is thin by design. The material consulted for this publication is the open-access text of the 2020 paper and its bibliographic record, which establish authorship and the paper's findings but not the author's position, institution or wider body of work. None of that is claimed here.

The paper, with Mitchell Callan, Annelie Harvey and Ana Gheorghiu as co-authors, is described in its abstract as the first meta-analysis of derogation experiments. It also reports two primary experiments by the same team.

Key papers

Dawtry, R. J., Callan, M. J., Harvey, A. J., & Gheorghiu, A. I. (2020). Victims, vignettes, and videos: Meta-analytic and experimental evidence that emotional impact enhances the derogation of innocent victims. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 24(3), 233-259. doi:10.1177/1088868320914208.

Key ideas

The paper covers 55 studies from 1966 to 2016, with 5,947 participants. The average effect was small, the differences between studies were larger than chance would produce, and studies using more emotionally impactful material, vivid and close to the observer, found larger effects. Whether the event was real or invented made no clear difference. Published studies showed larger effects, and the authors' sensitivity analyses suggest the true average is probably lower than the pooled figure. Two further experiments found that more impactful contexts increased derogation. See Victim Derogation.

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