Experimental Design
To test the first hypothesis I will use two strategies. First, I will compare average results of people with and without chat. Second, I will compare outcomes within individuals, taking advantage that individuals will only be assigned to the ChatGPT condition after one round of debates. I will be testing the second hypothsis by checking whether ChatGPT has an asymetric impact depending on the initial debating skills (at baseline) of participants. I will use the first round of debates to divide participants into top (50%) and bottom (50%) performers. Then I will compare average debating points in rounds 2 and 3 for top and bottom performers among individuals who use ChatGPT and among individuals who do not use ChatGPT. This will tell me whether the effect of ChatGPT differs depending on baseline performance. All policy debates will be on policy topics with two clearly different sides: a "pro-evidece" side and an "anti-evidence" side. I will look at the interaction of using ChatGPT and being assigned the anti-evidence position. The goal is to test whether the effects of using ChatGPT are stronger when used to defend pro-evidence or anti-evidence arguments. Finally, I will be testing "the persuasive" effect of the Chat, whether it contributes to changing beliefs of debate participants. Do students exposed to defend a specific topic update their beliefs on that topic? In what direction? Is that conditioned by the use of the chat? I will do that by testing whether subjects move closer, after the debate, to the position that they were randomly assigned to defend. I will also study whether the effect is bigger for those using ChatGPT.