'Study 4 - Construal of power and trust'
(AsPredicted #59,936)
Download PDF

---

---

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?
Question: Does the construal of power (opportunity vs. responsibility) of a powerholder influence others’ (less powerful people’s) trust in this powerholder – here operationalized as selection of a powerholder for a project?
Hypothesis 1: People more likely trust (select) a powerholder who construes power as responsibility than a powerholder who construes power as opportunity.
Hypothesis 2: People perceive a powerholder who construes power as responsibility as being higher in benevolence and higher in integrity than a powerholder who construes power as opportunity.
Hypothesis 3: Perceived integrity and benevolence predict greater trust in (selection of) the powerholder.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Main DV: trust in (selection of) a powerholder
Mediators: perceived benevolence (3 items) and integrity (3 items) of the powerholder (5-point scales; adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999).

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
2 within-subjects conditions: power as opportunity vs. power as responsibility;
presented in 2 different orders (2-between conditions: opportunity first vs. responsibility first)
Participants engage in a business scenario in which they need to choose between two potential leaders for a new client / project. They receive a self-description of two leaders, suggesting that one leader construes power mainly as responsibility, whereas the other construes power mainly as opportunity.

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
To test Hypothesis 1, we will perform a one-sample binomial test investigating if the null hypothesis (50% selection of either powerholder) can be rejected and participants selected the responsible powerholder more often than the opportunity powerholder. Prior to conducting this test, we will check whether the frequency of selecting one or the other powerholder depends on order of presentation with a Chi-Square-test.

To test Hypothesis 2, we will carry out a one-way repeated measures MANOVA with construal of power (opportunity vs. responsibility) as within-subjects factor, investigating if the responsible powerholder is rated higher on integrity and benevolence than the opportunity powerholder.

To test Hypothesis 3, we will perform a binary logistic regression with trust (selection of powerholder: 0 = opportunity, 1 = responsibility) as dependent variable. As predictors, we include difference scores (subtracting scores for the opportunity powerholder from scores for the responsibility powerholder) for both benevolence and integrity (including ability as control in an additional analysis, see #8) to test whether these variables predict the selection of the powerholder.

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
Participants have to be fluent in English (language-sensitive materials).
Participants have to be at least 18 years old.
Participants failing the attention check will be excluded.
Participants completing the survey via mobile phones will be excluded (because the survey was designed for larger screens)
We will carefully check (and report) if excluding participants according to these criteria changes results.

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-priori power analysis for the main analysis for Hypothesis 1 is not possible, prior effect sizes missing; accordingly, we aim at recruiting at least N=200 people (100 per between-condition). With a sample of this size we would be able to detect a small effect (Cohen’s g = 0.10) with a one-sample binomial test (two-sided) testing for a difference from a constant proportion of 0.5 with alpha = .05 and (1-beta) = .80.

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
Exploratory measures:
- Perceived ability (3 items; 5-point scale; adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999) of each powerholder. Based on our own earlier studies, the effect predicted in H1 might also be explained by perceived ability; we will test this in an additional analysis (as for benevolence and integrity, if differences between within-conditions occur, H2; and as control in testing H3)
- Check of construal manipulation (1 item, 7-point scale)
- Likability of each powerholder (1 item, 7-point scale)
- Perceived power of each powerholder (1 item, 7-point scale)
- Own leadership experience (1 item, dichotomous: yes/no), job experience (years), work sector

Generally, in case the internal consistency of the scales is insufficient (alpha < .60), we will reduce the number of items if this improves reliability.