Experimental Design Details
See the uploaded survey for exact wordings on all the questions.
The basis of this project is an incentivized survey. We hired the survey company IPSOS to carry out the data collection covering 4,000 US residents. This sample is divided into 500 participants from each of the eight gender-race combinations we study: Asian Male, Asian Female, Black Male, Black Female, Hispanic Male, Hispanic Female, White Male, White Female. Participants are recruited as representative samples of the respective groups with respect to age, gender, US region and education.
We attach the full survey as a separate document of this pre-registration. The centerpiece of the study are two threshold questions, which elicit people's willingness to support or oppose affirmative action conditional on other participants' behavior. These questions are incentivized through donations we make on behalf of the participants. Eighty percent of participants, those in treatment Public, have their email address posted on a public website if they choose to determine themselves to which organization the donation is made (i.e., they change it from a default, which we vary exogenously). The remaining twenty percent of participants are assigned to treatment Private, where all choices remain anonymous. Further, we randomly distribute participants in equal shares to the following three treatments: Gender, Race, and Similar. In all treatments, the participants can first condition their donation choice on a representative sample of US residents. In all treatments, there is a second question where the participants can condition their donation choice on a group that is more similar to them. In treatment Gender, the other group members have the same gender as the participants (i.e., a representative sample of US residents within gender). In treatment Race, all group members same race/ethnicity as the participant. In treatment Similar, the other group members are US residents who are similar to the participant with respect to gender, race/ethnicity, age group, education, and residence area.