'shame broadcasts social norms_studys1' (AsPredicted #72923)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 2 authors.
Pre-registered on 2021/08/17 - 06:28 PM (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? The main question being asked is whether other people's expressions of shame facilitate the learning of social norms compared to expressions of sadness.
H1: Participants will see stronger injunctive norms in a company against a workplace behavior when an employee at the company feels shame in response to enacting the behavior compared to when the employee feels sad in response to the behavior.
H2: Participants will see a workplace behavior as less descriptively normative in a company when an employee at the company feels shame in response to enacting the behavior compared to when the employee feels sad in response to the behavior.
H3: Participants will have stronger behavioral intentions to avoid engaging in a workplace behavior at a company when an employee at the company feels shame in response to enacting the behavior compared to when the employee feels sad in response to the behavior.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. There are three primary dependent variables, each measured by a single item:
Injunctive norm: At [company], to what extent are people punished for [engaging in the behavior]? (Continuous, 1=Not at all; 5=Extremely)
Descriptive norm: At [company], how common or uncommon is it for people at [company] to [engage in the behavior]? (Continuous, 1=Very uncommon; 5=Very common)
Behavioral intentions:
Imagine you worked at [company]. You like working at [company] and you want to continue to work at [company]. How likely or unlikely are you to [engage in the behavior]? (Continuous, 1=Extremely unlikely; 5=Extremely likely).
* Company, behavior, and employee name are randomly sampled (see Question 8).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? We manipulate the emotion that is associated with the workplace behavior (e.g., the target says that discussing shipping plans with a supplier made them feel [sad][ashamed]).
The assignment of emotion to workplace behavior is randomized within participants (see Question 8). That is, all participants evaluate both workplace behaviors and emotions. We randomize the order that participants evaluate each.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will create dummy variables for each condition called shame (0=sad; 1=shame) We will cluster standard errors by participant.
reg [DV] shame, cluster(participant_id)
H1, H2, H3 will be tested by the significance of the coefficient of the independent variable in the above model.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will exclude all observations for any participant who appears in the dataset more than once, determined by both duplicate participant IDs and duplicate IP addresses (if available). We will also exclude any observation that does not provide a valid participant ID.
At the end of the study, there is one attention check. Participants see a spreadsheet. Participants have to report a value from the spreadsheet.
Participants who do not complete the study in full (as indicated by 100 progress) will be excluded.
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. The study will be posted for 500 participants to Mechanical Turk. Data collection will stop once the request is filled on the platform (which sometimes leads to slightly fewer or more participants).
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Workplace behaviors: Participants view two workplace behaviors. We randomize the order in which participants evaluate each behavior. No predictions are made regarding the main or moderating effects of order.
We vary the name of the company and the name of the employee. Across participants, we use eight employee names (four male, and four female) and two company names for the purpose of stimuli sampling. We will collapse across all company and employee names in the analysis.
Additional DVs: Reason the target feels the way they feel
We also ask participants four questions about why they think the target feels the way they feel:
1. [The target] did something wrong/inappropriate at [the company].
2. [The target] experienced a disappointment at [the company].
3. [The target] did something people at [the company] approve of.
4. [The target] performed well at the [company].
All items assessed on a 5-point scale (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree)
The purpose of including these items is to assess whether people see shame as relating more to violating a norm than sadness. We test this by reverse-coding item 3 and averaging it with item 1, and then comparing mean differences between the shame and sadness conditions (see Question 5).
We also explore whether sadness is more associated with experiencing a disappointment than shame. We test this by comparing mean differences in item 2 between the shame and sadness conditions (see Question 5).
Item 4 is a filler item.
