'Psych predictors of rule respecting behaviors during COVID-19 outbreak' (AsPredicted #38214)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 5 authors.
Pre-registered on 2020/03/30 - 09:39 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? Moral disengagement mediates the relationship of (1) the normal personality traits of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness and (2) the dark triad of personality with rule respecting behaviors (“social distancing” and compliance with the “stay at home” government request).
Moreover, we predict also that :
1) Social trust (i.e., trust in others and in the government) (a) decrease the positive relationship between neuroticism and moral disengagement, (b) decrease the negative relationship among moral disengagement and rule respecting behaviors, but (c) increase the negative relationship among agreeableness and conscientiousness, with moral disengagement.
2) Social trust will predict both rule respecting behaviors.
We test the above prediction controlling for participants’ previous activity level (i.e., previous life habits leading the individual to spend time out of home) as predictors of both rule conforming behaviors (although we expect a stronger link with and compliance with the “stay at home” government request.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Predictors
Personality Traits. We administered the TIPI: Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2003). A Very Brief Measure of the Big Five Personality Domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504-528.
Dark Triad. We used the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen: Jonason, P. K., & Webster, G. D. (2010). The dirty dozen: A concise measure of the dark triad. Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 420–432.
Previous activity level. We used the items asking: “In the past 12 months, what percentage of your free time did you spend on physical activity during the week?(0-100%), plus a set of questions asking: “the activities they usually carried out in their spare time before the emergency, such as: “theater”, “Cinema”, “Museums / Exhibitions”, “Concerts”, “Sports shows”, “Pub”, “Restaurant”, “Dance club” (7-points from “never”, to “often during the week”).
Mediators
Moral Disengagement. We administered an 8-item version of the Civic Moral Disengagement Scale: Caprara, G. V., Fida, R., Vecchione, M., Tramontano, C., & Barbaranelli, C. (2009). Assessing civic moral disengagement: Dimensionality and construct validity. Personality and individual differences, 47(5), 504-509.
Social trust. We assessed social trust with a set of items asking how much TRUST the participant had in several social groups (i.e., “family members”, “friends”, “neighbors”, “colleagues from work or study”, “People they don't know who are of their nationality”, “People they don't know who are of another nationality”
Trust in government. We measured trust in government asking the participants how much TRUST they had in “The Italian government”, “The Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte”, “The President of the
Republic Sergio Mattarella”, “Political parties that do not are part of the current government”, “The European Union”.
Outcome
Rule respecting behaviors. We operationalize rule respecting behaviors with questions asking individuals about the degree of adherence with rules imposed by the quarantine regime. In detail, for the “social distancing” we administered the following items, all introduced by the following sentence: “These days…”, “I keep away from people and avoid crowded places.”, “I have limited my social relationships.”, “I am looking for new ways to socialize and be with others but who are attentive to the indicated security measures”, “I am sticking, by thread and by sign, to the directives issued by the Government.” For the “compliance with the “stay at home” government request”, we administered the following items: “- How many times have you left your house since quarantine began?”, “…how often do you leave your house during the week? (excluding going to work)”
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? One single condition.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Mediated/Moderated linear regression predicting the dependent variable. If preliminary analyses will show high level of data dependency by province or city (according to ICC) we will take clustering into account (i.e., method = Complex in Mplus). We will control for covariates such as gender, age, single/no-single, children (0, or number), day in which the questionnaire was filled-out, geographic area (i.e., north, centre, south, islands), perceived risk, number of reported cases in the region.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will exclude participants who incorrectly answer to two out of our three attention control questions.
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 plan to gather at least 1000 people scattered all around Italy
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) Depending on the data stratification we may decide to run multilevel mediated linear regression analyses.
Dr. valentina Rosa, and Luigi Cinque (Maj. Dr.. Guardia di Finanza) are other contributors.
We will test in an exploratory fashion if activity level moderates the relationship between moral disengagement and rule conforming behaviors, or personality traits/dark triad and moral disengagement or rule conforming behaviors.
