Supplemental Materials
What's Wrong With Using Steroids? Exploring Whether and Why People Oppose the Use of Performance Enhancing Drugs
by J. F. Landyet al., 2017, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
1) Have any data been collected for this study already?
No, no data have been collected for this study yet
2) Hypothesis. What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study?
In previous work, we have found that people’s opposition to anabolic steroid use is affected by whether the act is unfair (i.e., whether the user gains an advantage over anyone), dangerous for the user, against the rules of the league, and against the law. In the present study, we aim to replicate these findings with two key extensions: (1) We will use a new, bipolar, scale for our dependent variable, and (2) participants will read about a person using prescription stimulants to enhance cognitive performance, rather than steroids to enhance physical performance.
3) Dependent variable. Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Participants will rate how they feel about the person’s off-label use of prescription stimulants in the scenario on a 100-point slider scale, ranging from “the right thing to do” to “the wrong thing to do”, with the midpoint labeled "neither right nor wrong". The numeric values of the scale will not be visible to participants.
4) Conditions. How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
We will use a 2 (fairness: advantage vs. no advantage) x 2 (prudence: risk vs. no risk) x 2 (legality: illegal vs. legal) x 2 (university rules: banned vs. permitted) between-subjects design, for 16 total conditions. The exact text of each condition is available on this project's OSF page.
5) Analyses. Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
We will run a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 between-subjects ANOVA on wrongness ratings. Specifically, we predict that we will find a main effect of all four factors. In addition, in previous work, we found a significant interaction between league rules and legality, and between league rules and prudence. We predict that we will replicate those results as well (with university rules being analogous to league rules). We plan to conduct simple effects tests to explore any significant two-way interactions. We do not expect to observe any higher-order interactions, but if we do, we will decompose them into two-way interactions to interpret them.
6) More analyses. Any secondary analyses?
We will also include four manipulation checks in order to make sure that our manipulations were successful. We will not exclude participants based on these checks. Furthermore, we will conduct analyses to determine if there are interactions between these manipulation checks. For continuous manipulation checks (fairness and prudence), these will be ANOVAs, as with the main analyses. For categorical manipulation checks, they will be logistic regressions.
7) Sample Size. How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size?
840 participants (50 per cell, plus 5% over-sample to account for exclusions for failed attention checks; see below).
8) Other. Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., data exclusions, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
We will exclude participants based on an attention check. Participants will be asked about the character’s profession in the scenario, and they must correctly identify that she is a college student.