Power to Detect What? Considerations for Planning and Evaluating Sample Size.

ACADEMIC ABSTRACT: In the wake of the replication crisis, social and personality psychologists have increased attention to power analysis and the adequacy of sample sizes. In this article, we analyze current controversies in this area, including choosing effect sizes, why and whether power analyses should be conducted on already-collected data, how to mitigate the negative effects of sample size criteria on specific kinds of research, and which power criterion to use. For novel research questions, we advocate that researchers base sample sizes on effects that are likely to be cost-effective for other people to implement (in applied settings) or to study (in basic research settings), given the limitations of interest-based minimums or field-wide effect sizes. We discuss two alternatives to power analysis, precision analysis and sequential analysis, and end with recommendations for improving the practices of researchers, reviewers, and journal editors in social-personality psychology. PUBLIC ABSTRACT: Recently, social-personality psychology has been criticized for basing some of its conclusions on studies with low numbers of participants. As a result, power analysis, a mathematical way to ensure that a study has enough participants to reliably "detect" a given size of psychological effect, has become popular. This article describes power analysis and discusses some controversies about it, including how researchers should derive assumptions about effect size, and how the requirements of power analysis can be applied without harming research on hard-to-reach and marginalized communities. For novel research questions, we advocate that researchers base sample sizes on effects that are likely to be cost-effective for other people to implement (in applied settings) or to study (in basic research settings). We discuss two alternatives to power analysis, precision analysis and sequential analysis, and end with recommendations for improving the practices of researchers, reviewers, and journal editors in social-personality psychology.

Online Moral Conformity: how powerful is a Group of Strangers when influencing an Individual's Moral Judgments during a video meeting?

People make moral decisions every day. When making such decisions, they may be influenced by their companions (a so-called moral conformity effect). Increasingly, people make decisions in online environments, like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the moral conformity effect in an online context. We applied an Asch conformity paradigm by asking participants (N = 120) to reply to sacrificial moral dilemmas through the online video communication tool Zoom either when sitting in a "virtual" room with strangers (confederates instructed on how to answer; experimental condition) or when sitting alone (control condition). We found that people displayed a moral conformity effect on half the dilemmas included in our study as well as in the aggregate. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04765-0.

Deontologists are not always trusted over utilitarians: revisiting inferences of trustworthiness from moral judgments.

Recent research has looked at how people infer the moral character of others based on how they resolve sacrificial moral dilemmas. Previous studies provide consistent evidence for the prediction that those who endorse outcome-maximizing, utilitarian judgments are disfavored in social dilemmas and are seen as less trustworthy in comparison to those who support harm-rejecting deontological judgments. However, research investigating this topic has studied a limited set of sacrificial dilemmas and did not test to what extent these effects might be moderated by specific features of the situation described in the sacrificial dilemma (for instance, whether the dilemma involves mortal or non-mortal harm). In the current manuscript, we assessed the robustness of previous findings by exploring how trust inference of utilitarian and deontological decision makers is moderated by five different contextual factors (such as whether the sacrificial harm is accomplished by an action or inaction), as well as by participants' own moral preferences. While we find some evidence that trust perceptions of others are moderated by dilemma features, we find a much stronger effect of participants' own moral preference: deontologists favored other deontologists and utilitarians favored utilitarians. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 21 September 2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21325953 .

Utilitarianism in minimal-group decision making is less common than equality-based morality, mostly harm-oriented, and rarely impartial.

In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocation of resources. This approach allows not only to pit utilitarianism against equality-based morality, but also to study these modes of morality for both harm and benefit, and to directly address the role of group identity affecting the (im)partial nature of 'utilitarian' (i.e., outcome maximizing) decisions. In our experiments, across four different samples (total N = 946), we demonstrate that although participants generally prefer equality-based allocations over maximizing distributions, outcome maximizing choices become more prevalent when they served to minimize harm compared to maximizing benefit. Furthermore, reducing the objective value of the equal distribution outcomes further prompts participants to adopt a more utilitarian approach in situations involving harm, but has little effect in situations where benefits have to be distributed. Finally, the introduction of (minimal) group identity consistently demonstrates that decisions that maximize the overall outcome are more likely if they also serve the ingroup compared to when they rather serve the outgroup. We discuss how these findings have meaningful implications that may be especially relevant for recent movements that advocate a utilitarian approach to charity, and for our understanding of (im)partiality in lay people's 'utilitarian' decision making.

Can education change the world? Education amplifies differences in liberalization values and innovation between developed and developing countries.

The present study investigated the relationship between level of education and liberalization values in large, representative samples administered in 96 countries around the world (total N = 139,991). These countries show meaningful variation in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), ranging from very poor, developing countries to prosperous, developed countries. We found evidence of cross-level interactions, consistently showing that individuals' level of education was associated with an increase in their liberalization values in higher HDI societies, whereas this relationship was curbed in lower HDI countries. This enhanced liberalization mindset of individuals in high HDI countries, in turn, was related to better scores on national indices of innovation. We conclude that this 'education amplification effect' widens the gap between lower and higher HDI countries in terms of liberalized mentality and economic growth potential. Policy implications for how low HDI countries can counter this gap are discussed.

Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas.

Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people's responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bogus) to a single mouse or allow five other mice to receive the shock. Our results indicate that responses to hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior, but they are predictive of affective and cognitive aspects of the real-life decision. Furthermore, participants were twice as likely to refrain from shocking the single mouse when confronted with a hypothetical versus the real version of the dilemma. We argue that hypothetical-dilemma research, while valuable for understanding moral cognition, has little predictive value for actual behavior and that future studies should investigate actual moral behavior along with the hypothetical scenarios dominating the field.

Trust, trolleys and social dilemmas: A replication study.

The present manuscript addresses how perceived trustworthiness of cooperative partners in a social dilemma context is influenced by the moral judgments those partners make on Trolley-type moral dilemmas; an issue recently investigated by Everett, Pizarro, and Crockett (2016). The present research comprises 2 studies that were conducted independently, simultaneously with, and incognizant of the Everett studies. Whereas the present studies aimed at investigating the same research hypothesis, a different and more elaborate methodology was used, as such providing a conceptual replication opportunity and extension to the Everett et al. STUDIES: Overall, the present studies clearly confirmed the main finding of Everett et al., that deontologists are more trusted than consequentialists in social dilemma games. Study 1 replicates Everett et al.'s effect in the context of trust games. Study 2 generalizes the effect to public goods games, thus demonstrating that it is not specific to the type of social dilemma game used in Everett et al. Finally, both studies build on these results by demonstrating that the increased trust in deontologists may sometimes, but not always, be warranted: deontologists displayed increased cooperation rates but only in the public goods game and not in trust games. (PsycINFO Database Record

Intergroup Reconciliation between Flemings and Walloons: The Predictive Value of Cognitive Style, Authoritarian Ideology, and Intergroup Emotions.

Testifying to the gap in fundamental research on positive intergroup outcomes, we investigated reconciliation attitudes in a non-violent intergroup context (i.e., the linguistic conflict in Belgium). By incorporating both important predictors of negative outgroup attitudes (i.e., individual differences in rigid cognitive styles and authoritarian ideologies), and important predictors of reconciliation (i.e., intergroup emotions), we aimed to contribute to a more comprehensive theoretical framework for the analysis of intergroup relations. We recruited one Flemish (N = 310) and one Walloon (N = 365) undergraduate students sample to test the proposed model. Structural equation analyses with maximum likelihood estimation were conducted using the Lavaan package. In both samples, similar patterns were found. More in particular, the need for cognitive closure appeared to be the basic predictor of right-wing attitudes (i.e., right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation) and essentialist thinking, which were then associated with less outgroup empathy and trust, and more outgroup anger. Furthermore, outgroup trust and empathy were positively related to reconciliation. Interestingly, some differences between the Flemish and Walloon sample were found, such as the direct effects of need for closure and social dominance orientation in the first sample, and the non-significant effects of essentialism in the latter sample. Considering the ongoing public and political debate about the linguistic conflict in Belgium, these findings shed a new light on how individual differences relate to specific outgroup emotions, and how these are associated with important intergroup outcomes in the face of intergroup conflict.