Search

Preregistration for Economic Mobility & Karma Society Study

Supplemental Material, Supplemental_Materials_11.16.2020 for Investigating the Interplay Between Race, Work Ethic Stereotypes, and Attitudes Toward Welfare Recipients and Policies by Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, Erin Cooley, Christopher K. Marshburn, Stephanie E. McKee and Ryan F. Lei in Social Psychological and Personality Science

I. Overview The goal of this project is to examine how economic mobility affects individuals’ karmic attributions for their economic outcomes. We will conduct an online study that manipulates the salience of economic mobility and measure how it affects these attributions. II. Methods and Measures All measures are included in the uploaded copy of our Qualtrics surveys. In this study, participants will play a game in which they choose boxes that have a purportedly random number of tokes in them (in actuality, the number of tokens is predetermined based on condition). Participants will play five rounds of this game and will begin with 0 tokens. During each round, they will find out the number of tokens in the box that they chose as well as their overall token count across all rounds of the game. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two conditions in this game: an upward mobility condition and a downward mobility condition. In the upward mobility condition, participants will end the game with more tokens than they began with, and in the downward mobility condition, participants will end the game with fewer tokens than they began with. Following completion of the game, participants will be asked to indicate the extent to which they believe the outcome of the game is due to internal factors. They will also answer questions about their karmic attributions for the outcome of the game. The presentation of internal attribution questions and karma items will be counterbalanced with half of participants seeing the internal attribution questions first, and the other half seeing karma items first. These items will be followed by a Belief in a Just World scale worded to be about the game. Last, participants will complete a demographics questionnaire, data quality check questions, and will then be debriefed. III. Sample Size Plan For consistency with previous studies, we will recruit 650 participants. We will include attention checks and checks to confirm that respondents are human (as opposed to bots) in this survey. We will also exclude participants who report that they did not pay attention or answer honestly in our data quality check questions. If a significant amount of people do not pass these checks, we will continue data collection beyond 650 participants until we have collected a sufficient number of participants who have passed the checks. Participants will be recruited online through Amazon MTurk. IV. Hypotheses & Analysis Plan We expect that participants in the upward mobility condition will make more internal attributions for the game outcomes. Additionally, we think that people in the upward mobility condition will also make more karmic attributions for the outcomes of the game. We will test these hypotheses with a series of independent samples t-tests. Further, we will investigate whether internal attributions mediates the relationship between condition and karmic beliefs (regardless of whether or not there is a direct effect). We will also conduct exploratory analyses, such as the effect of mobility on BJW and whether any demographic measures may moderate our findings. We will investigate whether the results differ depending on including or excluding participants who fail attention checks. We will also investigate the data for potential outliers and may delete outliers if they violate model assumptions. Scale reliability for the karma and BJW scales will be assessed prior to analyses, and items may be dropped if necessary to achieve suitable reliability. Finally, we will investigate all model assumptions and will make the appropriate remedies when model assumptions are violated or, when necessary, will switch to a more appropriate analytic technique to analyze the data.

I. Overview The goal of this project is to examine how economic mobility affects individuals’ emphasis of and desire to perpetuate karmic religious beliefs. We will conduct an online study that manipulates the salience of economic mobility and measure how it affects these processes. II. Methods and Measures All measures are included in the uploaded copy of our Qualtrics surveys. In this study, participants will be told that they will take on the persona of a character in a new society called Dorrania for the duration of the study. They will learn that Dorrania is still forming its social systems such as its religion, economic systems, political systems, etc., and that they will have the opportunity to weigh in on how these social systems should be formed. They will then learn a bit about the Dorranian character whose persona they will take on. In the upward mobility condition, they will learn that their character has gradually accumulated wealth and lives in an upper-class part of Dorrania. In the downward mobility condition, they will learn that their character has gradually lost wealth and lives in a lower-class part of Dorrania. Participants will then answer questions about Dorranian social systems as the character they read about. They will first answer questions about how much they think Dorrania’s new religion should emphasize various religious beliefs. Five of the items in this measure are adapted from White et al. (2020) (ex: People bring their outcomes upon themselves by their previous, unrelated actions in their life), and the remaining six items are drawn from the six-item SBS scale (Jong & Halberstadt, 2016) (ex: There is some kind of life after death). Next, participants will answer questions about Dorrania’s economic system. They will answer one question about the extent to which they think the wealthy should be taxed to provide benefits to the poor, and will then answer three specific questions about wealth redistribution. We will test whether these four items have good reliability together, and if so, we will average them into one wealth redistribution index. Last, participants will complete a demographics questionnaire, data quality check questions, and will then be debriefed. III. Sample Size Plan For consistency with previous studies, we will recruit 650 participants. We will include attention checks and checks to confirm that respondents are human (as opposed to bots) in this survey. We will also exclude participants who report that they did not pay attention or answer honestly in our data quality check questions. If a significant amount of people do not pass these checks, we will continue data collection beyond 650 participants until we have collected a sufficient number of participants who have passed the checks. Participants will be recruited online through Amazon MTurk. IV. Hypotheses & Analysis Plan We expect that participants in the upward mobility condition will want to emphasize karma-related religious beliefs more than participants in the downward mobility condition. We will test this prediction with an independent-samples t-test. We will assess the reliability of these 5 karma items and, if acceptable reliability is reached, we will average them into a karma index that we will treat as our dependent variable. The other items in this scale serve as filler items and therefore are not relevant to this analysis. We will also test whether participants in the upward mobility condition are less supportive of wealth redistribution policies than people in the downward mobility condition, and whether condition has an indirect effect on support for these policies through karma. We will also conduct exploratory analyses, such as whether any demographic measures may moderate our findings. We will investigate whether the results differ depending on including or excluding participants who fail attention checks. We will also investigate the data for potential outliers and may delete outliers if they violate model assumptions. Finally, we will investigate all model assumptions and will make the appropriate remedies when model assumptions are violated or, when necessary, will switch to a more appropriate analytic technique to analyze the data.

Preregistration for Karma Society Study

Preregistration for Karma Box Game Study

Theists - regardless of religious affiliation - receive the benefit of being stereotyped as trustworthy and moral (Hall, Cohen, Mayer, Varley, & Brewer, 2015), whereas atheists are viewed as untrustworthy and morally uninhibited (Gervais, 2014a; Gervais, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2011). The extreme divergence between the stereotypes of theists and atheists suggests that mental images of the two groups may also diverge. We investigated whether people have biased mental images of theists and atheists. The results suggests that mental images of theists are associated with more positive attributes than images of atheists (Study 1), and these mental images influence who is believed to behave morally and immorally (Study 2). Together, the findings suggest that mental images may represent a subtle mechanism reinforcing group-based prejudices (both negative and positive).

Supplemental Material, SelfRacialGroupDiscrepancy_WhiteHealth_SuppMaterials_SPPS_R2 for Investigating the Health Consequences for White Americans Who Believe White Americans Are Wealthy by Erin Cooley, Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, Ryan F. Lei, Lauren E. Philbrook, William Cipolli and Stephanie E. McKee in Social Psychological and Personality Science

Stereotypes surrounding race and socioeconomic status often have overlapping attributes. That is, we tend to stereotypically associate African Americans and poor individuals with being incompetent. Further, people automatically associate African Americans with the concept of poor. The current research examined people’s mental representations of a homeless person, a poor person, and a person with a home, to see if people’s mental representation of a homeless varied from that of a poor person. Results from Study 1 (N = 524), using a bi-racial base image indicate that people, on average, mentally represent the poor and homeless in a similar manner. The results from Study 2 (N = 496), using a White base image, replicate the findings from Study 1, and indicate that the findings from Study 1 were not the result of idiosyncratic features of the original base image. Future directions are discussed.

Supplemental Material, SPPS771890_suppl_mat for Intentional and Unintentional Empathy for Pain Among Physicians and Nonphysicians by Victoria L. Spring, C. Daryl Cameron, Stephanie McKee, and Andrew R. Todd in Social Psychological and Personality Science

English language learners (ELL) are an ever-increasing population of students in K-12 schools. Studies have found significant differences in the academic achievement of ELL students and native English speaking students. The low academic achievement and high drop-out rates found for ELL students call for changes in the education strategies employed for these students. School librarians must use effective strategies to instruct these students in the information, media, and traditional literacies that are necessary skills for 21st century learners. Since little research has been conducted recently in the field of library science on the best practices for ELL library instruction, this paper examines recent research in the field of education and presents a purposeful selection of professional resources to aid school librarians in designing effective instruction for ELL students.