**Pilot study**
This study is intended as a pilot for an intended extension of the 1st3rd project with fMRI. Its purpose is primarily as a manipulation check, ensuring that participants in the fMRI study will:
- Believe that their partner is a real person, who is truly experiencing noise blasts
- Believe that their choices in the game have
nonrandom consequences (i.e., the noise blasts)
- Believe that it is they, and not a computer program or the experimenters, influencing the outcome of their card choices
- Be able to understand and play the
card game
**Procedure**
[First-person condition]
After pre-screening, participants are told that they are to play a game with another person (a confederate RA, who is present). They are told that in the first round, one participant will choose cards on the screen, and the other, sitting in an adjacent room, will experience either brief white-noise blasts or no noise as a result of the other partner's card choices. A video feed will show the 'active' player what the 'passive' player experiences on each trial. (In reality, the videos of the confederate RA are pre-recorded.) On the second round, they are told the players will switch. The confederate and experimenter collude to ensure that the participant is the 'active' player first, via an apparently random process.
Both the participant and confederate undergo calibration to ensure the noise-blast level is acceptable. The confederate is led to an adjacent room.
The participant completes one practice trial, and 24 experimental trials, of a card-selection task. On each trial, cards of two colors are shown, and the participant is asked to choose one, using the [g] or [h] key on the keyboard. Immediately following their choice, they see a 3-second clip of the confederate reacting to either a noise blast or to no sound. The video is bordered in either red (for noise) or green (for no noise) as an additional visual cue. They are then asked to respond to the question, "How wrong was your action?" on a sliding scale from 1 (not at all wrong) to 7 (very wrong).
After the experimental trials, the participants are asked manipulation-check questions, including a free-response question asking them to explain their strategy for choosing cards.
Finally, the participant exits the room, and is debriefed about the deception and the purpose of the experiment.
[Third-person condition]
The procedure is similar to the above, except that there is no confederate present. The participant is told that they will observe the recorded results of a game previously played between two other participants, and will only be asked to rate the actions of that game's active player.
**Intended sample size**
The target sample size (post-exclusion) is 20 participants per perspective condition (N=40 total). After 10 participants have been collected, the number of participants who detected the deception will be recorded. If more than half of these participants detect the deception, the pilot will be redesigned to mitigate this before continuing with data collection.
