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The current research aims to gain a better understanding of how people evaluate those who share certain types of information on social media. We will use four different simulated user accounts that will vary in terms of the total amount of headlines and the proportion of exaggerated headlines shared in each user account (no headlines, lesser number of headlines, greater number of headlines with no exaggerated news, greater number of headlines with half exaggerated news). More specifically, we will measure (1) how participants perceive the presence of certain traits in each user account; (2) participants’ likelihood of associating with each user; (3) perceived veracity of headlines shared in each user account. We will investigate whether such accounts are effective to yield social benefits (i.e., willingness to follow, become friends, and hire a given user). As another manner for estimating participants’ perceptions, we will also ask them to indicate if they think others would be willing to associate with the users and whether they think the headlines on those accounts is true.

The theoretical rationale for this study is the same as in our previous study at https://osf.io/f2xst. The main difference is that will use political headlines in the present study, whereas in the previous study we used neutral headlines. As a growing number of studies show that cognitive reflection is associated with a higher ability to differentiate true and false news, even when one’s beliefs are consistent with false information, we propose to assess whether inducing individuals to reflect about the sharing of news stories (instead of acting automatically) impact their willingness to share potential news stories. We will prompt reflection by instituting warning pop-up messages that promote reasoning and a concern for the sharer’s reputation whenever they chose to share false stories. This reputation factor will be included as recent findings suggest that most people are disinclined to share false information because of a genuine concern about their reputation. In the present study, we will use political news. Because partisanship has been found to influence the sharing of news on social media, we will also test participants’ political ideology in both studies. Predictions: Compelling participants to reason will decrease their chances of sharing false stories, especially if warned about their reputation. More specifically, participants in the warning conditions will change their minds when prompted, suggesting a venue for a low-cost intervention.

The goal of this pre-registration is to add information about the Study "Warning messages on social media (Political news)" (see https://osf.io/jk5e3). -We will only recruit participants who: - were born in the United States or; - answered "United States" to Prolific's pre-screener "What is your nationality?" The goal is to be consistent with Pennycook et al's (Study 3) in which only American participants were recruited. Additionally, all the headlines pertained to politics, requiring participants to have some level of familiarity with American politics. Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A. A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592(7855), 590-595.

Research suggests that humans make decisions in line with risk sensitivity theory (Stephens, 1981; reviewed by Mishra, 2014), such that we avoid risks until non-risky options no longer meet our needs – then, we switch to risk-preference to ensure our minimum need requirement is met. It is suggested that risk sensitivity theory can be used to explain the function of the highly cited loss aversion principle, which proposes that we disproportionately weigh losses over gains (Mishra & Fiddick, 2012; Mishra, 2014). We wonder how the role of need factors into gain-loss sensitivity and risk behaviour. We use tailored articles that suggest a position of high need, low need, or no need (control, ie. no articles) to our participants before they complete the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) as a measure of their risk-taking behaviour. In the BART, participants press a button to inflate a virtual balloon to gain points (or prevent loss of points), but there is a risk of the balloon popping on any given button press, which causes them to lose any accumulated points for that balloon. All participants will complete two different framings of the BART: 1) a gain framing where each successful button press gives them points; 2) a loss framing where each successful button press prevents the loss of points. Participants will complete 20 balloons in the gain framing and 20 balloons in the loss framing. Ultimately, we propose that need influences our gain-loss sensitivity, and it is this mechanism by which need affects risk-taking. With this, we seek to explain the functional basis behind loss aversion using risk-sensitivity theory.

This is an amendment to the pre-registration "Warning messages on social media".

A project that investigates dishonest responses to demographic questions on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Specifically in the context of a two-stage sampling design--i.e., where a "screening" survey is used to select participants for a follow-up survey.

Social value orientation (SVO) is a person’s preference for a specific distribution of outcomes between themselves and another individual. Establishing cooperation can be dependent upon whether the individual seeks equality in outcomes (prosocial orientation), to enhance their personal outcome (individualistic orientation) or to increase their relative advantage over others (competitive orientation). These orientations have been found to be predictive of strategies used in experimental economic games (Van Lange and Visser, 1999), and have been found to affect evaluations of reputational incentives (De Cremer & Van Lange, 2001; Simpson & Willer, 2008), and cooperative decision making (Van Lange, 1999). Therefore we posit that prosocials are less strategic than individualists when reputational opportunities arise. Thus, we predict that individualists will display increased sensitivity to invalid cues of observation, such as eyespots, as compared to prosocials. This study will extend on previous research on reputational cues and SVO by extending it to invalid cues of observation (e.g. eyespots).

3 original replications of Frank et al (1993)

Do threats to the health of your community increase perceptions of interdependence and thus cooperation? Fitness interdependence signifies the underlying relationship between outcomes for individuals. When people perceive their wellbeing to be related someone else’s, there is an incentive to help those individuals. The interdependent nature of the relationship with your community is highlighted when facing a common threat, in this case a virus. During the Covid-19 pandemic coordinated efforts of the group are needed to slow the spread and protect public health. Thus, the pandemic has the potential to increase the publics perceptions of interdependence with their community, which increases the willingness to cooperate.

This project contains two studies and we pre-registered both studies in the same pre-registration (see here https://osf.io/a3vj6). However, we submitted a new pre-registration for Study 2 prior to the start of data collection of Study 2. Below, you can find the updated pre-registration for Study 2. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the degree of exaggeration affects the transmission of potential news stories, when participants always see two versions of the same story.

What traits are signalled by environmentalism? Who perceives environmentalism as a positive trait, and who perceives it negatively? This experiment will investigate what traits are signalled when displaying environmental behaviours. Further, we will examine whether political affiliations affect environmental choices. We predict that the relationship between perceiving someone as (non)environmental and rating that person as having a certain trait (e.g., cooperativeness, generosity, social status) will be mediated by one's perception of how environmental that person's actions are. Further, we hypothesize that whether or not someone perceived an environmental person as possessing positive traits (e.g., cooperativeness, generosity, social status) will be moderated by the rater's political affiliations. The results of this study will help to understand the reasonings of when and why people tend to engage in environmental behaviours and, thus, will help to create situations in the future in which environmentalism would be perceived positively.

This project contains a template and instructions for registering a research project that uses an existing dataset. The contents of the Registration Metadata - aside from this sentence, the paragraph below, the 'Category', and the 'Subjects' - was carried over from the forked preregistration. Our study’s hypotheses are based on the relative state model of risk-taking. The relative state model of risk-taking proposes that those who take risks do so because the non-risky alternative to a risky behavior is not sufficient to meet some need (need state risk-taking) or because the person is able to withstand the negative consequences of a risk or does not believe that the risk is likely to result in negative consequences (ability state risk-taking). In the current study, the “risks” are those behaviors that increase a person’s chances of getting sick with, or spreading, COVID-19. Those in a need state would be people who are exposing themselves to the risk because they need to – such as people who are becoming distressed in self-isolation or people who need to leave their property for financial reasons. Those in an ability state would be people who are exposing themselves to the risk because they are able to withstand getting or spreading COVID-19, or otherwise believe they are not likely to get COVID-19 – such as people who are young and healthy, or people who do not have children or dependents living with them.

This study examines how much people choose based on a partner’s wealth (e.g., endowment size) vs. generosity (e.g., proportion given in past), depending on the variance among partners on these traits. We employ two conditions: 1) Equal wealth & unequal generosity condition (i.e., potential partners have similar wealth but have unequal generosity), 2) Unequal wealth & equal generosity (i.e., potential partners have unequal wealth but have similar generosity). Participants will choose which information (wealth or generosity) they want about potential partners.

Romantic relationships are extremely important to the survival and reproductive success of humans. Each individual brings their own resources into a romantic relationship and the degree to which a person possesses resources and qualities that are seen as desirable by others in the mating market determines their mate value. However, partners in a romantic relationship are not always equal; one may perceive themselves as having a higher mate value relative to the other. The perceived difference in mate value between an individual and their romantic partner is known as partner-self mate value discrepancy (MVD)(Sidelinger & Booth-Butterfield, 2007). MVD appears to influence behaviour in relationships. Because partners with a higher mate value are likely to have better alternative mating opportunities, they may also be more likely to defect from the romantic relationship or engage in infidelity (Buss, 2000). Due to this, it is likely that humans (and perhaps other organisms) evolved to possess mechanisms that track partner-self mate value discrepancy and aid in solving the problem of defection and infidelity (Buss, 2000). Recent studies have suggested that partner-self MVD predicts jealousy, forgiveness and mate-retention behaviours (Danel et al., 2017; Sidelinger & Booth-Butterfield, 2007). Collectively, it appears these behaviours are likely driven by the desire to retain one’s mate. The current study aims to replicate the effect of MVD on jealousy and investigate more specifically if MVD predicts forgiveness in response to infidelity. Further, we will investigate whether MVD predicts a more specific kind of mate-retention tactic, mate guarding behaviour. We will do this by asking participants to rate themselves and their romantic partners on various attributes measuring mate value. We will calculate MVD by computing a difference score. We will then assess participants jealousy, mate-guarding behaviour, and expose participants to a hypothetical infidelity vignette and assess their likelihood of forgiving their partner after the event.

Study aimed at investigating whether the "quality" of potential future cooperators influences signaling generosity.