Author(s) Lara Ditrich (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - l.ditrich@iwm-tuebingen.de Martin Lachmair (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien) - m.lachmair@iwm-tuebingen.de
Pre-registered on 2019/04/07 13:05 (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? RQ: How do different levels of immersion affect empathy with victims of climate change, problem awareness, and intentions to behave environmentally friendly?
H1: High (vs. low) immersion will lead to higher problem awareness.
For empathy, we test two competing hypotheses.
H2A: High (vs. low) immersion will foster empathy with victims of climate change.
H2B: High (vs. low) immersion will reduce empathy with victims of climate change.
H3A: High (vs. low) immersion will affect intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior positively, mediated by increased problem-awareness and increased empathy.
H3B: High (vs. low) immersion will affect intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior positively, mediated by increased problem-awareness, and will affect intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior negatively, mediated by reduced empathy.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior: 8-item scale adapted from Pfattheicher, Sassenrath, & Schindler, 2016
Problem awareness: 5-item scale adapted from Arlt, Hoppe, & Wolling, 2011
Empathy: 8-item scale, 6 items adapted from Batson, 1991, 2 adapted from de Vos, van Zomeren, Gordijn, & Postems, 2013
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? We run an experiment with a between subjects design with 1 factor (immersion) with 2 levels: low immersion (watching a 360°-documentary on a regular computer screen) and high immersion (watching a 360°-documentary in virtual reality glasses HTC Vive)
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Provided adequate reliability, all items measuring one DV will be averaged to form a scale.
H1, 2A , 2B: Independent samples t-tests comparing the means of the high and low immersion groups
H3A/B: Mediation analysis using the SPSS-macro “PROCESS” (model 4) with immersion as the predictor, empathy and problem awareness as parallel mediators, and intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior as the outcome.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Inclusion criteria:
- non-Psychologists (possible higher familiarity with employed questionnaires)
- age 18-35 (obtain rather homogeneous sample)
- non-suspicious of hypothesis (guess comparison; prevent demand effects)
- not familiar with video (likely reduces effect of video)
Any data from Ps who wish to withdraw their data after the debriefing or develop motion sickness in the VR-condition will be deleted (see ethical guidelines). We will carefully check (& report) if excluding Ps not fulfilling the inclusion criteria changes the results.
Outliers: We will exclude all participants with studentized deleted residuals values > 2.65 (Aguinis et al., 2013) in a regression with immersion as the predictor and intentions to show environmentally friendly behavior as the outcome.
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. According to Fritz & MacKinnon (2007), to detect an indirect effect in a mediation analysis with 80% power (assuming small-to-medium relations between X and M, and M and Y, α/β = 0.26) in a bias-corrected bootstrap analysis, 162 observations need to be collected. We will collect 180 observations to account for the eventuality of missing data and necessary exclusions.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will explore how immersion affects perspective taking with the persons displayed in the documentary. Perspective taking will be measured with 5 items modeled after Davis’ IRI (1983). In addition, we will explore whether immersion affects general empathy with nature with a 10-item scale adapted from Tam, 2013.
The igroup presence questionnaire will be used to test the success of our immersion manipulation. If our experimental manipulation does not affect our DVs, we will use participants’ immersion score as a predictor and will run regressions instead of t-tests.
We assess environmental norms (4-item scale adapted from Cheung, Luke, & Maio, 2014) to be able to explore whether those moderate or mediate the effect of immersion.
Finally, we will measure how much participants rotate their head / the video on the computer screen to assess engagement with the content and will explore the relations between engagement and our focal measures.
