'Informal Learning Processes on Social Media - A Field Experiment'
(AsPredicted #180,944)
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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?
Hypothesis 1: Participants receiving scientific information in their social media news feed (i) indicate less elaborate processing and (ii) acquire less objective knowledge than participants receiving the same information in a science newsletter.
Hypothesis 2: Participants in the elaborate social media condition will acquire more objective knowledge than participants in the simple social media condition.
Hypothesis 3: Participants' subjective issue knowledge will significantly increase during the field phase in all three conditions (simple social media, elaborate social media, news article).
Research Question 1: Are there differences in subjective knowledge between the different conditions?
Hypothesis 4a: Higher multitasking during social media usage is negatively related to (i) cognitive elaboration of social media posts, and (ii) objective knowledge acquisition.
Hypothesis 4b: Higher multitasking during social media usage is positively related to increases in subjective issue knowledge.
Hypothesis 5: The motivation to use social media to inform oneself (vs. for leisure) is positively related to (i) cognitive elaboration of social media posts, and (ii) objective knowledge acquisition.
Research Question 2: Is the motivation of social media usage associated with differences in subjective issue knowledge?
Hypothesis 6a: The expectation of social media contents to be easy to process is negatively related to (i) cognitive elaboration of social media posts, and (ii) objective knowledge acquisition.
Hypothesis 6b: The expectation of social media contents to be easy to process is positively related to subjective issue knowledge.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Objective knowledge acquisition is measured as the delta between T2 and T1. It is assessed by asking participants 12 pre-tested single-choice questions, with three distractors. All correct answers are coded as 1 and summed up. The correct answers to these questions can be obtained from the social media posts/newsletters.

Subjective knowledge acquisition is measured as the delta between T2 and T1. It is assessed as the mean agreement with the following four statements (5-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "fully agree"; Schäfer ,2020):
I know pretty much about the deep sea.
I am well informed about the deep sea.
When it comes to the deep sea, I know the relevant facts.
I have a good overview of information on the deep sea.

Elaboration is assessed by asking participants how much they agree with three statements on a 5-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "fully agree" (Ho et al., 2016).

Multitasking is assessed with 8 items, asking how often (4-point scale from "never" to "usually") participants engaged in different actions while using social media/reading the newsletter.

Motivation to inform oneself is assessed by asking participants how often they used social media on a 4-point scale ranging from "never" to "usually"
To learn something new
Gather information about scientific or political topics
Learn interesting facts
We further assessed entertainment motivation, social interaction motivation, and self-expression motivation (Nanz et al., 2020).

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
The experiment consists of three conditions (i.e., social media with elaboration, social media without elaboration, and newsletter). In the two social media groups, participants are asked to follow one of two Instagram channels. These channels will post identical information about the deep sea in the form of Instagram stories on four consecutive days. In the "social media with elaboration condition", we will additionally ask two elaboration questions per day in the style of "which information was most surprising to you?".

Participants in the newsletter condition will receive a newsletter containing the same information as the instagram stories on the same four consecutive days.

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
We will perform unpaired t-tests for hypotheses 1 - 3. For the remaining hypotheses, we will perform linear regressions within the simple social media condition.

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
In addition, we will measure how many participants clicked on the link to read the newsletter. Further we will ask participants to voluntarily share their Instagram name. We plan to analyze the effect of exposure to Instagram Stories/ newsletter in comparison to not viewing either.

We will further exploratory conduct a mediation analysis on hypothesis 1 (treating elaboration as a mediator and objective knowledge as the outcome variable).

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 aim for N = 1000 (n_SM = 500, n_elaborativeSM = 250, n_Newsletter = 250). This allows small effects to be detected (d = 0.2, 1 - 𝛽 = 0.8, 𝛼 = 0.05 for group comparisons r = 0.11, 1 - 𝛽 = 0.8, 𝛼 = 0.05 for correlations within social media without elaboration group).

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
We will only include complete datasets. In addition, we will exclude participants that fail both attention check, as well as participants who score low on self-reported attention.