Designing Information Provision Experiments

Beliefs about minority representation in policing and support for diversification

“…An important advantage of information provision experiments in general is that they can be used to test for causal links between belief accuracy and other outcomes without deception ( 33 ). A growing body of empirical research also supports their efficacy: across a variety of contexts, individuals typically update their beliefs in the direction of the evidence they receive ( 34 – 38 ).…”

In-Group Bias in Preferences for Redistribution: A Survey Experiment in Italy

“…Only 1% of the sample (38 individuals) was dropped. We also included a trap question as suggested by Haaland, Roth and Wohlfart (2020) to identify respondents that were inattentive and speeded through the surveys. We also explained to participants why researchers use these checks 7 and asked them to select a specific answer to a simple question unrelated to the survey content.…”

Fake News: Susceptibility, Awareness and Solutions

“…In particular, they are informed that they are taking part in an academic research survey and they are explained that participation is entirely anonymous and voluntary. After the first demographic questions, we implement a simple but widely used attention check (see, e.g., Faia et al, 2021;Roth and Wohlfart, 2020) in order to screen out participants leading to potentially low quality observations. The survey company Qualtrics was in charge of rewarding respondents for completing the survey.…”

“…Secondly, our survey design aligns the literature that uses surveys with information experiments and randomized control trials in economics. This growing literature has studied the change in the demand for news when people are informed that this is fact-checked (Chopra et al, 2022); the change in the rate of sharing of "alternative facts" on social media, as well as variations in factual knowledge and voting intentions, when individuals are provided with fact-checked vs non fact-checked information (Barrera et al, 2020;Henry et al, 2022); the variation in economic anxiety as a reaction to information about Covid-19 contagiousness (Fetzer et al, 2021); the effect of information on individual perceptions about racial inequities and the support for pro-black policies (Alesina et al, 2021;Haaland and Roth, 2021); changes in preferences for redistribution following information that corrects the perceived standing in the income distribution (Cruces et al, 2013); and the formation of beliefs and expectations about macroeconomic variables and their reaction to the provision of experts' forecasts (Coibion et al, 2019;Haaland et al, 2020;Roth et al, 2022;Roth and Wohlfart, 2020). Our paper describes the first application of an information experiment to study the causal effect of informing individuals of their ability to discern the accuracy of news headlines.…”