Om. When leading participants into the room, the experimenters made sure

Om. When leading participants into the room, the experimenters made sure not to draw attention to the priming materials. The experimenters did not mention or look at the primes when giving instructions to the participants, and none of the participants mentioned or asked questions regarding the priming materials. After being seated, participants were left unattended for one minute to ensure that they saw the priming ZM241385 site materials, after which they would begin the essay evaluation task. In the suspicion check, participants were asked to speculate jasp.12117 on the experiment’s true purpose by choosing one of seven options: “attitudes and prejudice”, “logic and reasoning”, “language fluency”, “perceptual ability”, “critical thinking”, or “memory”. The majority (51.5 ) chose “perceptual ability”, while only 7 chose the first option. Of those participants who believed that the study investigated attitudes and prejudice, none mentioned thePLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178 January 26,5 /Failure to Observe Different Effects of God and Religion Primes on Intergroup AttitudesFig 1. A depiction of the administration setting, including a computer (for task completion) and priming materials. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178.greligious primes or successfully identified the manipulation in their answers to an open-ended follow-up to the first suspicion check. Measure of Implicit Attitudes: Attitudes towards ingroup and outgroup members were assessed using an essay evaluation task, in which participants were asked to critically evaluate an essay supposedly written by either an ingroup or outgroup member. Evaluations of written material have been used to implicitly assess intergroup attitudes in previous research (e.g. [50, 51]), and a similar technique was adopted in the present study. Participants were asked to read a ICG-001 price 460-word essay entitled “Why Should You Complain About Bad Service?” in which the author argued that complaining is necessary if the standard of customer service in Singapore is to be improved. According to the cover story, an undergraduate from a local university wrote the essay as part of an essay competition. Participants were told that the student author was given the essay title and asked to be both as persuasive and as concise as possible when arguing in favor of the allocated position. In reality, the essay was chosen from a large online repository of sample undergraduate essays, with key details modified in order to fit the local Singaporean context. The essay was chosen because of its appropriate length, and journal.pone.0158910 also because it displayed reasonably good spelling, grammar, and rhetorical ability without seeming too polished, which may have led participants’ to doubt its authenticity. In order to ensure that the sample essays appeared to be legitimate, text entry boxes for the author’s name, university identification number, and signature were included, with the contents blacked-out in order to give the impression that his or her identity was being purposely concealed by the experimenter. The only identifying information that remained unobscured was the contestant’s university, which was designated as either Nanyang TechnologicalPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178 January 26,6 /Failure to Observe Different Effects of God and Religion Primes on Intergroup AttitudesUniversity (NTU) or the National University of Singapore (NUS), in order to identify the author as either an ingroup or outgroup member, respectively. NUS and NTU are the.Om. When leading participants into the room, the experimenters made sure not to draw attention to the priming materials. The experimenters did not mention or look at the primes when giving instructions to the participants, and none of the participants mentioned or asked questions regarding the priming materials. After being seated, participants were left unattended for one minute to ensure that they saw the priming materials, after which they would begin the essay evaluation task. In the suspicion check, participants were asked to speculate jasp.12117 on the experiment’s true purpose by choosing one of seven options: “attitudes and prejudice”, “logic and reasoning”, “language fluency”, “perceptual ability”, “critical thinking”, or “memory”. The majority (51.5 ) chose “perceptual ability”, while only 7 chose the first option. Of those participants who believed that the study investigated attitudes and prejudice, none mentioned thePLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178 January 26,5 /Failure to Observe Different Effects of God and Religion Primes on Intergroup AttitudesFig 1. A depiction of the administration setting, including a computer (for task completion) and priming materials. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178.greligious primes or successfully identified the manipulation in their answers to an open-ended follow-up to the first suspicion check. Measure of Implicit Attitudes: Attitudes towards ingroup and outgroup members were assessed using an essay evaluation task, in which participants were asked to critically evaluate an essay supposedly written by either an ingroup or outgroup member. Evaluations of written material have been used to implicitly assess intergroup attitudes in previous research (e.g. [50, 51]), and a similar technique was adopted in the present study. Participants were asked to read a 460-word essay entitled “Why Should You Complain About Bad Service?” in which the author argued that complaining is necessary if the standard of customer service in Singapore is to be improved. According to the cover story, an undergraduate from a local university wrote the essay as part of an essay competition. Participants were told that the student author was given the essay title and asked to be both as persuasive and as concise as possible when arguing in favor of the allocated position. In reality, the essay was chosen from a large online repository of sample undergraduate essays, with key details modified in order to fit the local Singaporean context. The essay was chosen because of its appropriate length, and journal.pone.0158910 also because it displayed reasonably good spelling, grammar, and rhetorical ability without seeming too polished, which may have led participants’ to doubt its authenticity. In order to ensure that the sample essays appeared to be legitimate, text entry boxes for the author’s name, university identification number, and signature were included, with the contents blacked-out in order to give the impression that his or her identity was being purposely concealed by the experimenter. The only identifying information that remained unobscured was the contestant’s university, which was designated as either Nanyang TechnologicalPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0147178 January 26,6 /Failure to Observe Different Effects of God and Religion Primes on Intergroup AttitudesUniversity (NTU) or the National University of Singapore (NUS), in order to identify the author as either an ingroup or outgroup member, respectively. NUS and NTU are the.