Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 4 authors.
Pre-registered on 2023/08/22 - 01:56 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? H1: individuals who believe in conspiracy theories have a conspiracy-specific attentional bias compared to non-believers.
H2: Participants' conspiracy-specific attentional bias is positively associated with the extent to which they endorse general conspiracy theories.
H3: Participants' conspiracy-specific attentional bias is positively associated with the extent to which they belief in specific conspiracy theories.
H4: Participants' conspiracy-specific attentional bias is positively associated with the extent to which they report a conspiracy mentality.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. 1. Reaction times in the color-naming task. Participants will perform a modified version of the Stroop task, where they will be presented with words from two different categories (conspiracy-related and neutral) in one of three colors (red, blue, green). Their task is to indicate the color of the word by pressing the corresponding key on their keyboard. Their reaction times and the key they pressed will be recorded. For each participant, an average reaction time for each of the two word categories will be calculated.
2. Belief in general Conspiracy Theories. Participants will complete the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (Brotherton et al., 2013).
3. Belief in specific Conspiracy Theories. Participants will complete the Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire (Lewandowsky et al., 2013).
4. Conspiracy Mentality. Participants will complete the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (Bruder et al., 2013).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? No conditions
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. To test the first hypothesis, an independent samples t-test will be conducted with believers versus non-believers as grouping variable and participants conspiracy-specific attentional bias (as measured by subtracting latencies for neutral words from latencies for conspiracy-related words) as dependent variable.
To test the second, third and fourth hypothesis, three separate hierarchical regressions will be conducted with participants' scores on the, respectively, Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale + the Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire + Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire as the dependent variable. In the first block, demographic variables (age, gender) will be entered as predictors. In the second block, participants' conspiracy-specific attentional bias will be entered.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Participants who fail to correctly answer the attention check will be eliminated from analysis. Following the procedure by Cha and colleagues (2010), reaction times from incorrect trials will be deleted. In addition, trials in which the reaction time is +-2 SDs from the participant's mean will be disregarded, as well as participants whose mean latencies are +-2 SDs from the sample mean. Participants whose error rate is +-2 SDs from the mean error rate of the sample will also be eliminated.
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. Based on the results of Study 1 in which Cohen's d's varied between .435 and .710 (based on the exclusion criteria applied to the data), we need a total number of 168 participants for a power of .80.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Nothing else to preregister.
