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? Question: Does the construal of power (opportunity vs. responsibility) of a power-holder influence less powerful people‘s trust in the power-holder?
Hypothesis: Power construed as responsibility will evoke higher trust among other less powerful people than construing power as opportunity.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Main DV: trust in the power-holder measured with four items on 5-point scale (adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999); in case the internal consistency of the scale is insufficient (alpha < .60) we will reduce the number of items, if this improves reliability.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? 2 between-subjects conditions: power as opportunity vs. power as responsibility. Participants will read a political speech which is based on an original speech by the current president of the EU-commission (which is not mentioned to participants). This speech was adapted as to suggest that the politician construes his power mainly as either responsibility or opportunity, according to the respective experimental condition. A manipulation check will be included (1 item).
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We perform an independent sample t-test to test our prediction, comparing power as responsibility to power as opportunity with trust in the power-holder as DV.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Requirements for participation:
- fluent in German (language-sensitive materials)
- aged 18-35 years (materials designed for "typical" undergraduate students)
Any data from participants who wish to withdraw their data after debriefing will be deleted.
After excluding participants according to these criteria, data will be checked for outliers using studentized deleted residuals (SDR) from a multiple regression of the main DV on the main IV. Participants with an absolute SDR > 2.65 will be regarded as statistical outliers.
We will carefully check (and report) if excluding participants not fulfilling the criteria changes results.
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. An a-priori power analysis with g*power (Faul et al., 2009) assuming d = 0.35 (small to medium effect) with alpha = .05 and (1 - beta) = .80 yielded an ideal sample size of N = 260 (130 per condition)
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) For exploratory reasons, we will assess the perceived trustworthiness of the power-holder with three scales addressing the three dimensions of trustworthiness: ability, benevolence, integrity (3 items each, taken from Halmburger et al., 2019). We will perform a mediation analysis (Hayes, 2013; model 4) to examine if our predicted effect may be explained by the perceived benevolence attributed to the power-holder.
Additional exploratory measures: perceived power of the power-holder (1 item); own perceived power (4 items), sympathy towards the power-holder (1 item), generalized trust in politicians (1 item), political orientation (1 item), competitive jungle view (14 items; Duckitt, 2001), suspicion about the identity of the speaker.
