Maurice Schweitzer's 'The Psychology Of Forgiveness'

In the article "The Psychology of Forgiveness", Maurice Schweitzer studies the psychology behind forgiveness and trust. Maurice and his colleagues, Michael Haselhuhn and Alison Wood, conducted an experiment to see if basic beliefs about moral "character" influence trust violations and forgiveness. These scientists also wanted to see if they could manipulate ones beliefs to either make them more or less forgiving. In their experiment they recruited a large amount of volunteers to participate in an experiment where they are giving six dollars and they have the option to give away their six dollars to double the value and the doubled value can be split and both people make profit but each person is prepped differently. The independent variable in this case would be way the volunteers were prepped and the dependent variable would be whether they reestablished
First, the researchers only tested their experiment on a unknown amount of people which does not provide enough evidence to prove their thesis. Maurice only tested his experiment on a "large group" of volunteers which does not describe how many people were in the study. The experiment also lacks data so there is no evidence that will prove their claims are true. Without any data one has to just believe what they say is true. The fact that the participants were volunteers also skews the validity of the study because the people are willing to be a part of the experiment and knew what they were getting in to. Another aspect of her research that leads to it being invalid is that it is a correlation study. One can infer that changing the way the participants were prepped had influence on whether they would be forgiving or not forgiving but one cannot conclude that it is the cause of their greater performance. That point is stated in a famous psychology line which is correlation does not imply