Following this 2nd blog post, people finished the second short term questionnaire which included a comparable activities since the first to the review of culprit. A last section concerned participants’ number of political appeal, political worry about-placement towards 10-part remaining–proper continuum, gender, years, section of household and you will degree.
Members was basically randomly allotted to one of half a dozen experimental conditions derived throughout the 2 (perpetrator’s gender) ? 3 (repairs tactic) between players factorial build.
Most of the actions performed inside study have been in accordance with the moral conditions of your own federal look committee along with the 1964 Helsinki endments.
Evaluation of your own political actor
People stated their all over the world feelings to your fictitious politician to the a 10-section level (step one = totally bad to ten = completely positive) twice, after from the T1 (post-scandal) and once at T2 (post–protective reaction). The effectiveness of the brand new defensive strategy within the repairing reputation are captured from the improvement in evaluation of your protagonist.
Analysis of the politician’s communality and you can service before and after his or their excuse of your scandal
The new respondents evaluated new scandal perpetrator for the an effective 5-area level ranging from step one (not at all) so you can 5 (very much) twice, just after adopting the scandal (T1) and when adopting the perpetrator’s defensive reaction (T2). Participants ranked new perpetrator on three adjectives for each for the communality dimensions (honest, practical and you can empathetic) and you can company dimensions (determined, skilled and good; elizabeth.grams., Bauer 2017 ). Brand new indices constructed on the fresh new suggest issues attained sufficient accuracy: ? communality article-scandal = 0.80; ? communality article-excuse = 0.74; ? agency article-scandal = 0.63; ? company blog post-reason = 0.67.
Overall performance
First regression analyses including the 
politician’s attractiveness, respondents’ sex, respondents’ governmental direction, respondents’ degrees of demand for government and respondents’ expectations concerning relative honesty of females and you can people did not yield people main neither communication effect on the fresh mainly based variables. As such, they don’t be considered inside then analyses.
We tested H1 using a 3 (type of defensive tactic) ? 2 (perpetrator’s gender) ANOVA on the global attitude toward the politician after his/her defensive reaction including the previous attitude (T1) as a covariate. The hypothesised two-way interaction between the independent variables proved to be the only significant effect, F (2, 185) = 6.06; p = 0.003; ? 2 p = 0.06 (Figure 1 ). Further inspection of this interaction revealed that the ‘diffusion of responsibility with accusation of another person’ was effective only when used by the man, simple slope = 0.11, SE = 0.04, 95% CI [0.03, 0.19], whereas the ‘excuses with claims of mitigating circumstances’ was effective only when used by the woman, simple slope = 0.09, SE = 0.04, 95% CI [0.00, 0.17]. Finally, contrary to our expectations, ‘mortification with request for forgiveness’ did not vary its efficacy as a function of the politician’s gender, simple slope = 0.00, SE = 0.04, 95% CI [–0.08, 0.08].
Indicate globally emotions into good scandal culprit just like the a function of his/the lady gender plus the verbal strategy familiar with safeguard him/herself.
Regarding H2, the ANOVA including the agentic and communal dimensions measured at T2 as a repeated factor (and those measured at T1 as covariates) revealed the main effect of the repeated factor, F (1, 184) = 9.13, p = 0.003, ? 2 p = 0.05, signalling that the defensive reactions were globally more effective in improving the perpetrator agentic traits (M = 0.30, SD = 0.17) than the communal ones (M = 0.27, SD = 0.18). This analysis also elicited the two-way interaction between the type of defensive tactic and the repeated factor, F (1, 184) = 9.13, p 2 p = 0.14, indicating that the ‘diffusion of responsibility’ improved the evaluation of the perpetrator on agentic traits more than the other defensive tactics, that did not differ from each other at the LSD post-hoc test, whereas none of the tactics differed from each other as for the efficacy in improving the perceived perpetrator communality. In addition, the two-way interaction between the gender of the politician and the repeated factor, F (1, 184) = , p 2 p = 0.15 showed that the defensive reactions, irrespective of the type, improved the communality traits of the female politician (M = 0.31, SD = 0.19) more than those of the male one (M = 0.23; SD = 0.17), simple slope = 0.06, SE = 0.02, 95% CI [0.02, 0.10], whereas they were equally effective in improving the agentic traits of the male politician (M = 0.32, SD = 0.18) and those of the female one (M = 0.28, SD = 0.16), simple slope = 0.04; SE = 0.02, 95% CI [–0.01, 0.08].