'How Perceived Status Threat Moderates the Relationship Between Extreme Political Beliefs and Paranoia in the United States' (AsPredicted #89835)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 3 authors.
Pre-registered on 2022/03/03 - 01:20 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? We hypothesize that extreme political beliefs (extreme liberalism; extreme conservatism) will be associated with increased experiences of paranoia and magical thinking in everyday life. Importantly, however, we predict that perceived status threat will moderate the relationship between extreme political beliefs and paranoia/magical thinking. More specifically, the positive relationship between extreme political beliefs and paranoia/magical thinking will be heightened at higher levels of perceived status threat. Additionally, we hypothesize that perceived status threat will similarly moderate the strength of the association between extreme political beliefs and endorsement of conspiracy theories.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Paranoia will be measured using the Green Paranoid Thoughts Scale part B (Freeman et al., 2019).
Magical thinking will be measured using the Magical Ideation Scale (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983).
Status threat will be measured using a scale adapted from Brown, Rucker, & Richeson (2021).
Political beliefs will be measured using a seven-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? There will be no conditions, however analyses may be stratified by race or socioeconomic status.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Linear regression predicting paranoia/magical ideation as a function of political beliefs and perceived status threat. Importantly, we will be including a political belief by perceived status threat interaction term in the model. We will test to see if significant relationships persist when controlling for additional demographic factors.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Outliers in nonskewed data will be defined as points greater than 3 SDs from the sample mean; outliers in skewed data will be defined using methods outlined by Hubert and Van der Veeken (2008), as implemented by R's RobustBase package (Todorov & Filzmoser, 2010). All identified outliers will be winsorized (Fuller, 1991), preserving rank order.
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. We will collect up to 250 unexcluded participants.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Endorsement of conspiracy theories will be measured using a 5 question survey created by Bruder et al. (2013).
