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 others‘ (less powerful people‘s) trust in this power-holder?
Hypothesis: Power construed as responsibility will evoke higher trust in the power-holder among others (less powerful people) than power construed 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 a 5-point scale (adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999).
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? 2 between-subjects conditions: power as opportunity vs. power as responsibility.
Participants imagine being in a café and overhearing a power-holder (leader) recounting experiences in his or her power-role; these pieces of the conversation suggest that the power-holder construes power mainly as either responsibility or opportunity (depending on condition).
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We perform an independent sample t-test to test our hypothesis , 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. Participants have to be fluent in German (language-sensitive materials).
Any data from participants who wish to withdraw their data after debriefing will be deleted.
We do not include psychology students in our sample as they might be suspicious about our hypothesis.
We exclude participants older than 35 years, because participants are recruited from the student body. Students older than 35 years are an exception and might thus be outliers in terms of career path, past experiences, etc. which might also relate to our main measures.
After excluding participants according to these criteria, data will be checked for outliers using studentized deleted residuals (SDR) from a multiple regression of trust in the power-holder on manipulated construal of power (responsibility vs. opportunity). Participants with an absolute SDR > 2.59 are regarded as statistical outliers and will be excluded.
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. a-priori power analysis with g*power (Faul et al., 2009): d=0.35 (small to medium effect); alpha .05; power .80; allocation ratio N2/N1= 1; ideal 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?) Exploratory measures:
- We will assess the perceived benevolence (5 items), integrity (6 items) and ability (5 items) of the power-holder (5-point scales adapted from Mayer & Davis, 1999) to test their role as potential mediators of the hypothesized effect with PROCESS (Hayes, 2013; model 4).
- We will assess expected empowerment of the power-holders’ followers (7 items from Pircher-Verdorfer & Peus, 2014; 7-point scale) to test its role as potential mediator of the hypothesized effect with PROCESS (Hayes, 2013; model 4).
Additional exploratory measures: perceived power of the power-holder (1 item), sympathy towards the power-holder (1 item), check of construal manipulation (1 item).
Generally, in case the internal consistency of the scales is insufficient (alpha < .60), we will reduce the number of items if this improves reliability. The study will be conducted in German.
