'Nostalgia and Morality: The links among nostalgia, morality, and punishment.'
(AsPredicted #96160)
Created: 05/05/2022 06:20 AM (PT)
This is an anonymized version of the pre-registration. It was created by the author(s) to use during peer-review.
A non-anonymized version (containing author names) should be made available by the authors when the work it supports is made public.
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: Nostalgia is positively correlated with moral concern.
H2: Nostalgia is positively correlated with punitiveness.
H3: The relationship between dispositional nostalgia on punitiveness is mediated by moral concern.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Nostalgia: Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS; Sedikides et al., 2015). This 7-item scale measuring perceived frequency and importance of nostalgic engagement. Scores will be aggregated.
Moral Concern: Moral Foundations Questionnaire 30 (MFQ30; Haidt et al., July 2008). This 30-item scale measures five moral foundations (six items per foundation): (1) Care/Harm, (2) Fairness/Cheating, (3) Loyalty/Betrayal, (4) Authority/Subversion, and (5) Sanctity/Degradation. Scores will be aggregated within each foundation, creating five foundation-specific indices.
Punitiveness: We have created a measure in which participants rate their attitude toward punishment for 10 moral-violation scenarios based on the five moral foundations (two scenarios per foundation, based on Study 3, Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). For each scenario, participants' attitudes toward punishing the transgressor will be measured by averaging the following two items: "How important is it to punish [name] for this action?" (1 = not at all, 7 = very important) and "How severely, if at all, should [name] be punished?" (1 = not at all, 7 = very severely). We will create five foundation-specific punitiveness indices by first averaging the scores on the four items (we do not make different predictions for the level of moral violation severity).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? This is a correlational study, therefore no conditions.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Nostalgia and moral concern. We will enter the five MFQ subscales in a mixed Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), with nostalgia as a between-subjects covariate and moral foundation (Care/Harm vs. Fairness/Cheating vs. Loyalty/Betrayal vs. Authority/Subversion vs. Sanctity/Degradation) as a within-subjects variable.
Nostalgia and punitiveness. We will enter the punitiveness ratings in a mixed ANCOVA, with SNS as a between-subjects covariate and moral foundation (Care/Harm vs. Fairness/Cheating vs. Loyalty/Betrayal vs. Authority/Subversion vs. Sanctity/Degradation) as a within-subjects variable.
Mediation analyses. We will create overall measures of moral concern and punitiveness by averaging the pertinent scores across moral foundations (we do not predict a main effect among moral foundations). We will test the indirect effect of nostalgia on overall punitiveness via overall moral concern, using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013; 5000 bootstrap samples).
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will embed an attention check item ("I am currently attending a university that does not exist" (1 = strongly agree, 7 = strongly disagree), and eliminate all participants who enter values greater than 1.
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. 250
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will measure dispositional nostalgia using two other scales to examine convergent validity. The first scale is the Personal Inventory of Nostalgic Experiences (PINE) scale (Newman et al. 2020), and the second is the Nostalgia Prototype Features Scale (Hepper et al. 2012). We may conduct secondary analyses using a composite of the three nostalgia scales.
We will measure empathy using an 8-item version of Mehrabian and Epstein's (1972) empathy scale. Past work has demonstrated nostalgia increases empathy (e.g., Zhou et al. 2008), and empathy is a moral emotion (Tangney, Steuwig, and Mashek 2007). Therefore, nostalgia-evoked empathy may also be related to moral concern and punitiveness. We may test an extended mediational chain in which empathy intervenes between nostalgia and moral concern.
