'Children's perceptions of harm motivated by group vs. personal reasons' (AsPredicted #42,760)
Author(s) Vivian Liu (New York University) - vl845@nyu.edu Andrei Cimpian (New York University) - andrei.cimpian@nyu.edu
Pre-registered on 2020/06/11 14:41 (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? This study evaluates children’s perceptions of intergroup harm based on different reasons (group membership reason vs. personal reason). Children will be told about two transgressions (taking someone’s eraser or knocking over someone’s block tower). The reason for the transgressions (group reason vs. personal reason) will vary across participants. Children will then be asked to evaluate each transgression on a set of dimensions (detailed below). We hypothesize that younger children will consider harm based on a group reason as less serious than harm based on a personal reason. We also expect that with age, children will see harm done for group-based reasons as increasingly problematic.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. 1. Act: How bad is what A did to B? (1-4 scale)
2. Rating of Aggressor: Is A a good person or a bad person? (1-4 scale)
3. Rating of Victim: Is B a good person or a bad person? (1-4 scale)
4. Punishment: Should A be punished? (1-3 scale)
5. Victim-Blaming: Did B do something bad before this? (1-4 scale)
6. Future Ingroup Harm: The next day A was playing with another ingroup member. Will A do the same thing? (1-4 scale)
7. Future Outgroup Harm: The next day A was playing with another outgroup member. Will A do the same thing? (1-4 scale)
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? There are 2 between-subject conditions:
1. Group Reason: script describes intergroup harm because of group membership (i.e., “because I don’t like [group name].”)
2. Personal Reason: script describes intergroup harm because of a personal reason (i.e., “because I don’t like you.”)
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will investigate the effects of condition on a battery of measures (see above) using a series of regression models (one per measure). We will factor in age (continuous), condition (categorical), and their interaction as predictor variables to explore developmental changes. Children’s gender, race, and socioeconomic status may be included as moderators. We will also investigate if there are any significant correlations between the 7 DVs, and potentially aggregate across subsets of DVs (e.g., the ratings of the act, aggressor, and severity of punishment, which were strongly correlated in prior work) and/or include some DVs as covariates.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Participants will be excluded if (1) they needed the script to be repeated two times or more for any comprehension check question, (2) they did not finish the entire study, or (3) their parents or another person (e.g., a sibling) intervened/interrupted.
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 a total of 120 participants (60 per condition). This sample size is based on a power analysis using the effect size from a previous, similar study (Cohen’s d = .50) and assuming power = 80%.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We may conduct additional analyses involving (1) demographic moderators (gender, race, SES, etc.), and (2) some of the measures as moderators (depending on the results of preliminary reliability analyses and inspection of correlation matrices).
