Document is current

Article History

Received: 13 May 2025

Accepted: 24 February 2026

First Online: 22 April 2026

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This research received approval by the Departmental Review Board of the Department of Occupational, Economic, and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria (2024/M/011, approved on 26/08/2024). Belgian participants were recruited at Ghent University. Under Ghent University’s guidelines, minimal-risk online studies that have received external ethics approval through a partner institution, do not require additional local review. Participants from the UK and US were recruited via Prolific, which requires researchers to operate under their home institution’s ethics approval. Therefore, no local ethics approval was required. All procedures complied with institutional guidelines and GDPR.

: All studies were pre-registered prior to data collection (Study 1:  ; Study 2:  ; Study 3:  ; Study 4:  ). The pre-registered exclusion criteria for participants in all four studies were: a) incomplete participation, b) below “very good” language proficiency, c) failing one of the two attention checks. After applying these criteria, some samples (studies 1 and 3) were below the target sample size but should remain appropriate in light of the observed effect sizes. Deviations are clearly mentioned in the manuscript.