'Replication of Study 4 of Savary & Dhar (2019)' (AsPredicted #27,222)
Author(s) Joseph Simmons (University of Pennsylvania) - [email protected] Leif Nelson (University of California, Berkeley) - [email protected]
Pre-registered on 2019/08/27 11:39 (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? This study is a replication of Study 4 in Savary & Dhar (2019), “The Uncertain Self: How Self-Concept Structure Affects Subscription Choice,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This study examines the hypothesis that “consumers with low [self-concept clarity] are both more likely to retain and less likely to acquire the same identity-relevant subscription, compared to consumers with higher [self-concept clarity].”
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Participants will be asked which of two magazines, The Economist or People, they would prefer to acquire (in the acquisition condition) or retain (in the retention condition). They will answer this question using a sliding scale anchored at 1 = People and 100 = The Economist. (The numbers on the scale won’t be visible to participants, but they will be recorded by the survey software). This will serve as the primary dependent variable.
Additionally, a key assumption of this research holds that The Economist is judged to be more identity relevant than People magazine. To test this, after the self-concept clarity manipulation, we will randomly assign 1/6 of our participants to a “manipulation check” condition in which they rate how identity-relevant the two magazines are. They will consider both magazines in turn (in a random order), and for each one they will indicate how much they agree or disagree with two statements, “Owning this product tells me something positive about myself” and “Having this product would communicate certain desirable qualities about me.” The scales will be anchored at 1 = “strongly disagree” and 5 = “strongly agree”. The second item will be reverse coded, and then the two ratings will be averaged to form an index of identity relevance.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? We will manipulate two primary factors. First, participants will either “write a few sentences about the three aspects of your life that make you feel the most certain about yourself” (the high self-concept clarity condition) or they will “write a few sentences about the three aspects of your life that make you feel the most uncertain about yourself” (the low self-concept clarity condition). Second, participants will either decide whether to acquire People or The Economist (the acquisition condition) or they will imagine possessing both subscriptions and then decide whether to retain People or The Economist (the retention condition). Thus, participants will be randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 (low vs. high self-concept clarity) x 2 (acquisition vs. retention) between-subjects design.
As alluded to above, an additional 1/6 of our participants will not be assigned to either the retention or acquisition condition, but will instead complete the manipulation check items described above.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. The original study shows two separate and opposite effects, and so we will analyze these effects separately. Thus, we will run two key analyses, conducting a t-test of low vs. high self-concept clarity separately for the acquisition condition and for the retention condition.
We will also perform separate small telescopes analyses on the effects of self-concept clarity within acquisition condition and the retention condition to determine whether the effects replicated.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will necessarily exclude from the main analyses any participant randomly assigned to complete the manipulation check instead of the primary dependent variable. In general, we will retain any participant who completes the dependent 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 will collect data from 1500 U.S. MTurk participants.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) For those assigned to complete the manipulation check items, we will conduct a paired t-test comparing the ratings for The Economist vs. the ratings for People magazine. We expect people to judge The Economist to be more “identity-relevant” than People magazine.
