'Replication of study 4 from JPSP Vol. 124, No. 3, 521–543'

https://aspredicted.org/m6kt-4fwn.pdfView Download PDF

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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 will attempt to replicate study 4 from the 2023 JPSP paper, "Collective Transcendence Beliefs Shape the Sacredness of Objects: The Case of Art". The main question is how many of the findings we will replicate.


We will enumerate the hypotheses in the same way that the original authors did in their preregistration: https://osf.io/9dsf4/?view_only=db4a696d677a4e4c9fe2a476f3d38ff5.
We will refer to the "control condition manipulating the art's uniqueness" as just a "control condition" for the sake of clarity.


When calculating the replicability rating for this study, we will assess how many of the original 10 hypotheses replicate with our dataset (i.e., in our dataset, we'll assess how many of those results have an effect in the same direction and with statistical significance assessed in the same way as in the original study). However, when assessing the clarity rating, we will focus more on what we see as the main claim of the overall paper, which is that people will deem an object that they experience as collectively transcendent as sacred "not because the object has great personal meaning to them, but because they believe the object has great meaning to the collective." So our clarity rating will involve a stronger focus on hypotheses H7-H10 in the original paper.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Dependent variable: perceived sacredness (assessed using the same questions outlined in the original study's preregistration: https://osf.io/9dsf4/?view_only=db4a696d677a4e4c9fe2a476f3d38ff5 )

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
Participants will be randomized to one of five conditions. The first four conditions will be defined in the same way as in the original study's preregistration: https://osf.io/9dsf4/?view_only=db4a696d677a4e4c9fe2a476f3d38ff5​​


The fifth condition is not part of the replication process but may pertain to our clarity rating. It is an alternative "uniqueness" condition that we hope will produce levels of uniqueness at least not significantly lower than those of the experimental conditions. Here is the text (asterisks demarcate sections that have a bold typeface):

"This is a painting titled "The Lotus". It is considered a work of art because of its *uniqueness*. It was recently painted by an outstanding young artist who is only five years old, and who began to paint at the age of two. In a recent media interview, the young prodigy - who is also surprisingly well-spoken - was quoted as saying, "I wish I could create *an artwork that is really one-of-a-kind*."

Impressed by the young prodigy's previous artwork, a group of donors worked together to plan out how to create a painting that was *truly one-of-a-kind.* They funded the creation of a set of paints for the child to use to meet the goal of creating a truly unique artwork. The paints were created in a laboratory solely for the purpose of being used for this painting, and they will *not be created again (they were far too expensive to produce, and the ingredients were not recorded)*."

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
With one exception noted below, we will conduct the same statistical tests as described in the original study's preregistration: https://osf.io/9dsf4/?view_only=db4a696d677a4e4c9fe2a476f3d38ff5​​


The one difference between our analysis and the original team's analysis is that we will conduct PROCESS in R instead of SPSS. We will also specify our random seed to enable other teams to reproduce our findings. We will use the following parameters: model = 4, boot = 10000, seed = 290417.

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
We will use the same exclusion criteria as outlined in the original study's preregistration: https://osf.io/9dsf4/?view_only=db4a696d677a4e4c9fe2a476f3d38ff5​​


In addition, the Positly online recruitment platform automatically excludes participants who have a low quality rating in their previous MTurk task participation.

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.
The number of participants we include per group will be approximately 1.2 times the number of participants per group in the original study. Instead of 202 participants per condition, we will stop data collection after we have at least 243 participants per condition (after exclusions). Our final sample size will be at least 1215 participants.


The original study authors used the lowest Cohen's d from the t-tests in their previous study in order to plan the sample size for their next study. If we follow the same process, we could consider the lowest Cohen's d from the t-tests in study 4 comparing the collective meaning and sacredness ratings of different conditions to the control condition, which was 0.59. We used G-Power to determine what we would need to detect an effect size as low as 75% of that original effect size (i.e., as low as 0.4425) with 90% power: this would mean 109 participants per group, so a total sample size of 436. However, instead of using this method of determining sample size (like the original authors), we will not stop data collection until our experiment has many more participants - at least as many participants as the original study 4 had. This is because our main focus is on the PROCESS results (since that is what the "headline" results were from the study), rather than the t-test results. (We would conduct a power analysis based on those results, but the author of the textbook on PROCESS states in his textbook that he does not believe in power calculations.)

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
Similar to the authors of the original study, we will conduct all analyses both with and without people who identify as Buddhists included in the sample, in case this influences the results (since the spiritual and combined conditions both refer to Buddhism in relation to the painting).

We may also conduct some additional analyses that are not involved in the replication. For example, we may test one additional alternative mediator: the perception that an artwork will produce positive emotions in many people (assessed via a final Likert scale question at the end of the study asking for participants' agreement with the statement, "This piece of art makes many people feel positive emotions").

If we conduct exploratory analyses that were not pre-planned, we will label them as such.

Here is a link to a preview of all the questions: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/3loe9rf/preview

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