Economic Mobility &amp; Karma - Box Game
Creators: name: Caluori, Nava
name: McKee, Stephanie
name: Brown-Iannuzzi, Jazmin
name: Gervais, Will M
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: 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 &amp; 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.