'Cognitive, affective and behavioral components of conflict – part 2' (AsPredicted #163,634)
Author(s) Moritz Vogel (Student) - moritz.vogel@rptu.de Jürgen Buder (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - j.buder@iwm-tuebingen.de
Pre-registered on 2024/02/26 02:26 (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? Main question:
This study aims to investigate congeniality bias and uncongeniality bias. We are interested in whether uncongeniality bias is moderated by emotion reactivity. As in a previous study we are interested in subjective conflict (part 1). Subjective conflict will be measured with two items. Each item measures one conflict component (cognitive and affective component). The choice of these components is based on a previous study. In an exploratory analysis, we want to investigate the course of subjective conflict in selective exposure and selective response while reading a discussion comment in a sentence-by-sentence display.
Confirmatory analyses:
Hypothesis 1.1:
Larger conflict will be positively associated with a larger willingness to reply to the given discussion comment (uncongeniality bias).
Hypothesis 1.2:
The uncongeniality bias (formulated in hypothesis 1.1) is moderated by emotion reactivity.
Specifically: The larger the emotion reactivity, the larger the association between conflict and the willingness to reply to a given discussion comment.
Emotion reactivity will be measured with the German version of the emotion reactivity scale (Lüönd, 2023). From that scale we use the components emotion sensitivity and emotion intensity. To calculate the measurement value (data point), the item responses are summed.
Hypothesis 2:
Larger conflict will be negatively associated with the willingness to read more about the given discussion comment (congeniality bias).
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Willingness to read more (read-item):
Participants are asked whether they would prefer to read any further (reverse item; selective exposure instruction). Response on a 5-point Likert scale (from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree).
Willingness to reply (write-item):
Participants are asked to indicate their willingness to respond (selective response instruction). They are not required to actually write a reply. Response on a 5-point Likert scale (from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? There is just one group in this study (within participants design). Each participant is presented with 6 discussion comments (selection and adoption from previous studies) arguing for alternative medicine or arguing against alternative medicine. For each discussion comment the participant is presented with the read-item and the write-item. The order of the discussion posts is random.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will fit linear mixed-effect models for each dependent variable separately.
1. Willingness to read (selective exposure): We conduct a linear mixed effect model. The model includes random intercepts and random slopes (comment and participant) and it includes the main effect of conflict as a fixed effect.
2. Willingness to reply (selective response): We conduct a linear mixed effect model. The model includes random intercepts and random slopes (comment and participant) and includes the main effect of conflict as a fixed effect.
3. For the interaction-hypothesis we use a model with random intercepts (comment and participant), without random slopes. That model contains an interaction term with emotion reactivity.
No alpha error correction is made for these confirmatory analyses. A significance level of α = .05 is applied.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Participants with a standard deviation of 0 (regarding emotion reactivity) or mean of 5 in their original attitude towards alternative medicine will be excluded.
Outliers will be identified by using (generalized) Cook´s distance (regarding the models from section 5).
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. A sample size planning (simulation; procedure according to Kumle et al., 2021; scenario 3) resulted in a minimum sample size of n = 167. The sample size planning based on the model 3 in section 5 (regarding the interaction). With a buffer, we want to survey 184 participants. A power of 1-β = .90 and a significance level of α = .05 were applied. The used estimated values for the corresponding parameters (alpha, betas) are 1.91, 0.187, 0.136, 0.085. Within a conservative approach, parameter estimates (beta) were reduced by 15%. The values for the random variances are 0.66 and 0.02. Residual standard deviation is set on 0.55. The simulation based on 2500 single runs.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Exploratory, we want to explore the course of conflict in selective exposure and selective response within a discussion comment. To this end, the discussion comments were divided into three components. Each discussion comment consists of a claim, justification and example. The order of these components varies between the discussion comments. After each component (sentence; referred to as type) we present four items: read-item, write-item, cognitive conflict item and affective conflict item. This means that the same items are presented three times per discussion comment. The third ratings are used for the confirmatory analyses (see section 2). For the statistical implementation, model 2 in section 5 will be extended with a variable for type or position, respectively (without interaction analysis).
Exploratory, we aim to investigate if the pattern of conflict components resembles that observed in the previous study.
