'shame broadcasts social norms_study5' (AsPredicted #49620)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 2 authors.
Pre-registered on 2020/10/14 - 03:32 AM (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 neutral emotion expressions.
H1: Participants will make a financially costly decision to avoid making the same choice that a group member made when that group member shows shame in response to making the choice compared to when the group member shows a neutral emotional expression in response to making the choice.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. In the description of the dependent variable, BLUE = choice made by target; RED = choice forgone by target.
We ask participants to make a choice between RED and BLUE after watching the target make his/her decision. Participants earn $0.19 for selecting BLUE and $0.15 for selecting RED. Our primary dependent variable (DV1) is binary: 1=RED, 0=BLUE.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? This is a between-subjects design. There are two conditions: expressed shame, expressed a neutral emotion.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will analyze the dependent variable using a test of independence:
Syntax: tab condition DV1, chi
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 IP addresses are available). We will also exclude any observation that does not provide a valid participant ID.
Participants must pass an AV check to access the study. Participants who fail this check twice are excluded from participating.
Participants answer three questions about the instructions. Participants have two opportunities to answer these questions. We will exclude participants from the survey whose final answer involves two or more incorrect answers.
We will exclude participants who do not complete the study in full, as determined by not having a study progress score of 100.
At the end of the study, participants are asked whether they had any technical issues. If participants answer “yes,” participants are then asked whether these technical issues prevented them from watching the videos. We will exclude participants who answer “Yes” to this latter question.
In the practice round (Round 1) and target round (Round 2), participants report the choice of Group Member 4. Only participants who answer both these questions correctly will be included in the analyses (choosing BLUE in ROUND 1 and BLUE in ROUND 2).
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 650 participants to Prolific Academic. 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?) Additional Measures:
Participants are asked three questions prior to making their incentivized choice related to perceived injunctive norms and perceived descriptive norms.
In the description of the dependent variables, BLUE = choice made by target; RED = choice forgone by target.
Q1. “In this group, is it more acceptable to select BLUE or RED?” (More acceptable to select BLUE; More acceptable to select RED; Similarly acceptable to select BLUE or RED).
Q2 “In this group, is it more wrong/inappropriate to select BLUE or RED? (More wrong/inappropriate to select BLUE; More wrong/inappropriate to select RED; Similarly wrong/inappropriate to select BLUE or RED).
Q3. Participants see pictures of the three non-target group members. For each non-target group member, participants indicate whether they think the person selected BLUE or RED. We score RED = 1 and BLUE = 0. We will sum the responses for each of the non-target group members, such that higher scores equate to a stronger descriptive norm against the target group member’s choice.
These measures are secondary and are not the focus of this study. We used these questions as the primary dependent variables in a prior preregistered study #48282. We will use the analysis plan stated in that preregistration to analyze these measures.
We also will explore whether perceived injunctive norms and/or perceived descriptive norms relates to participants’ choice of “BLUE” or “RED”
Stimuli sampling and additional exploratory analyses
We vary the video that participants watch across four different actors (two male and two female actors) for purposes of stimuli sampling. In our primary analysis, we will collapse across these videos. In an exploratory analysis, we will control for the target in the video in the following two ways:
We will treat the target that participants are assigned as a categorical variable taking the values 1, 2, 3, or 4. We will run the following test:
reg DV1 i.condition i.video, vce(robust)
We will treat the gender of the target as a dummy variable and run the following test:
reg DV1 i.condition i.female, vce(robust)
We also will explore whether target gender (male, female) moderates the effect of showing shame vs. not showing shame on participants’ choice of either “BLUE” or “RED”
