(Follow Up) Can a Shared National Identity Trump Ethnic Identity? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Singapore (with RCT ID AEARCTR-0007559)

The new intervention will be an online survey on 1,300 participants, adults residing in Singapore. The survey will ask a bunch of attitudinal and socioeconomic questions. Beyond that, we will carry out a conjoint experiment, a supermarket voucher experiment, and a donations experiment. All details in the box below.

The individual characteristics we will collect are are ethnicity, marital status, language spoken at home, monthly income, occupation, place of birth, legal status (born Singaporean/became Singaporean/permanent resident), year start residing in Singapore, apartment size, apartment tenure, number of people living in the apartment, education, religion, religiosity, strength of ethnic and national identification, views on national identity, views on inter-ethnic relations, perceptions on ethnic stereotypes (heard of them or not & agreeable or not), experience of ethnic discrimination, experience of stereotyping, political interest, political preferences, sources for political information, level of degree of satisfaction with different public services (public schools, government hospitals, access to electricity, access to water/sanitation, overall safety and security), views on what the state should do to provide for the needy,

2024-03-20

2024-04-10

See all details below.

For intervention 1: Characteristics of recipient associated to higher levels of altruism. These are five characteristics: ethnicity, household size, socioeconomic status, occupation status, nationality.

For intervention 2: Rates of donations to the different NGOs

For intervention 3: Rates of keeping the voucher for the different supermarkets.

All details provided in the word document attached under "analysis plan"

All details provided in the word document attached under "analysis plan"

There will be three experiments:

1. Conjoint experiment: The primary goal is to allow us to tease out whether people are more likely to exhibit altruism towards those they think deserve their help.

2. Donations experiment: To examine whether people are more likely to exhibit altruism to their co-ethnics, we will ask participants to choose a local NGO to make a $10 donation to. We will randomly select 100 participants and make (with our funds) the donations according to their preferences. Participants will be reminded adequately that all donations will be made, that this is not a hypothetical scenario but a real one. The goal of this question is to examine whether on average participants prefer to donate to coethnic organizations, or organizations that cut across ethnic lines (like, for example, support for the disabled or the arts). The exact wording of this question in the questionnaire is given below.

3. Supermarket voucher experiment: The primary goal of this is to examine whether residents are more likely to disregard free vouchers from a particular supermarket than from other ones.

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* 1. Conjoint Experiment: *
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[SURVEY PARTICIPANTS WILL GET THREE ROUNDS OF THIS QUESTION, EACH ONE WITH A DIFFERENT COMBINATION OF ATTRIBUTES]
"Let us imagine for a moment a hypothetical scenario wherein you have an extra S$50 to give to someone. You have a choice between two individuals, both of whom are completely hypothetical and not real people"
Characteristics to randomize:
a. Ethnicity (i) Chinese male name (ii) Malay male name (iii) Indian male name
b. Occupation (i) Janitor (ii) admin assistant (iii) senior surgeon
c. Household size (i) Lives with his partner and two children (ii) Lives with his partner, two children and in-laws
d. Recent situation (i) Just lost his job due to a sudden restructuring of the hospital he was working for (ii) Just lost his job due to repeated poor performance reviews
e. Nationality (i) Arrived to Singapore 5 years ago (Foreigner) (ii) Was born and raised in Singapore (Singaporean)

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* 2. Donations experiment *
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As part of this project, we will donate some funds to local NGO according to the preferences of participants. We are asking each participant which organization they would like to give a $10 donation. We will randomly select 100 survey respondents and make $10 contributions on their behalf, according to their choices.

If you were randomly selected, to which organization would you like us to make a donation of $10? Note: The donation will only be made if you are one of the randomly selected participants, and you will know at the completion of the survey if you are one of the randomly selected participants.

Please review the following options: [randomize the order of options]

 Yayasan Mendaki (Council for the Development of Singapore Malay/Muslim community) https://www.mendaki.org.sg/ MENDAKI’s programmes assist students and individuals with education and training, helping to uplift the Malay/Muslim community’s educational performance and develop its resilience and adaptability.

 Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA) https://www.sinda.org.sg/ SINDA aims to raise the academic performance of Indian students and youth through tutorials, enrichment and motivation. In addition, it also offers a wide range of services to support parents and help families in need.

 Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) https://www.cdac.org.sg/aboutus/organisation-profile/ CDAC is a non-profit self-help group for the Chinese community. It offers programmes and assistance schemes to help the less privileged in the community to maximise their potential and strive for social mobility through self-help and mutual support.

 Children’s Wishing Well: https://www.wishingwell.org.sg/ This organization is focused on the holistic education of children and youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and offers a broad range of services to them free-of-charge.

 Friends of the Disabled Society (FDS) https://www.fds.org.sg/ This organization is dedicated to meet the social, emotional and physical needs of the disabled by providing avenues for them to interact among themselves and with able-bodied persons. They also encourage independence among the disabled by providing job opportunities to them.

 The Theatre Practice https://www.practice.org.sg/page/donate This organization strives to be an arts space in Singapore that consciously nurtures and empowers people who care about humanity. It has developed and presented works that aim to reflect the richness and complexities of Singapore’s diverse cultures.


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* 3. Voucher Experiment *
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[At this point we note that we preferred to do this as a real experiment, but cold find no company doing online surveys in Singapore that would have the logistics to implement so].

Our last experiment aims to assess whether all supermarkets are equally valued by residents in Singapore. This third intervention is relevant to explain the return rates of misdelivered vouchers in the field experiment carried out in AEARCTR-0007559, as it allows us to tease out whether recipients’ return rates of misdelivered vouchers (i.e., our measure of pro-social behavior) are potentially driven by the different value recipients place on different supermarkets. One possible confounding factor is that, instead of driven by altruism, recipients of our misdelivered vouchers may be returning Sheng Siong vouchers because they expect others to value Sheng Siong vouchers much more than they do. That is, participants with high SES may have a much lower preference for Sheng Siong vouchers than low SES participants.

This third experiment will allow us to examine whether this is the case. Participants will be asked to think about a hypothetical scenario in which, after volunteering for a day, they receive a token of appreciation in the form of a supermarket voucher for one of the three most popular chains (randomize: Cold Storage, NTUC, or Sheng Siong). Then they'll be asked whether they would prefer to keep it, or whether they would prefer to donate it to another volunteer. This is a hypothetical experiment as we could find no company that had the capability to deliver vouchers to participants in online surveys.

The exact question participants will see is as reproduced below:

"Suppose that after volunteering one morning for the NGO you chose above, as a token of appreciation they selected at random some volunteers and gave them a $10 supermarket voucher [Randomize: Sheng Siong / NTUC / Cold Storage]. If you were selected at random, would you prefer to keep the voucher, or would you rather pass it on to another volunteer?
□ I would prefer to keep it
□ I would prefer to donate it to another volunteer"

We opted for this instead of letting participants choose among three supermarket vouchers for the following three reasons: (1) Participants could be more likely to choose the supermarket that is closest to them; (2) Even if all participants were to choose a particular supermarket, this would not mean they disregard the other two options; and perhaps most importantly (3) the experiment we have chosen most closely resembles our previous field experiment, with three different alternatives instead of only one.

Given our total sample of 1,300 participants, 433 participants will see one supermarket, 433 another one, and 434 a third one (see related power analysis below). The null hypothesis to test is whether keeping rates (i.e., the rates with which respondents choose to keep the vouchers for themselves) are the same, the alternative being that keeping rate for one supermarket is significantly higher than for the other ones.

All randomizations will be done algorithmically by the survey company provider: Qualtrics.

Only one level of randomization for both interventions: Individual

No

1,300 individuals

1,300 individuals

For conjoint experiment, all randomizations will be given equal probability.

For the donations experiment, all individuals whose choices are effectively donated will be selected with equal probability (although this will be done ex post, so it should not alter the results in any way).

For the voucher experiment, all participants will be randomly allocated with equal probabilities (one third) to each of the groups: Sheng Siong, NTUC, Fair Price

Check **Power Analysis for Conjoint Experiments*** https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/9yuhp The attached document included in "analysis Plan" includes the relevant computations *********************************** * 2. Donations Experiment * *********************************** *********************************** * 3. Voucher Experiment * *********************************** These are our power computations using STATA/MP16. power twoproportions average1 average2, n(#) twosided For an effect size of 5% (return rates differing by at least 5%): power twoproportions 0.1 0.15, n(866) power twoproportions 0.5 0.55, n(866) power twoproportions 0.9 0.95, n(866) Comparison groups will be of size 433. This means that for an effect size of 5%, for two-sided comparisons, we have a statistical power ranging from 0.6046 (if keeping averages are 0.1 & 0.15) to 0.7987 (if return averages are 0.9 & 0.95). Power drops to 0.3133 at the 0.5 vs 0.55 keeping rates. For an effect size of 10% (return rates differing by at least 10%): power twoproportions 0.1 0.2, n(866) power twoproportions 0.5 0.6, n(866) power twoproportions 0.9 0.99, n(866) For an effect size of 10%, for two-sided comparisons, we have a statistical power ranging from 0.9855 (if keeping averages are 0.1 & 0.2) to 1 (if return averages are 0.9 & 0.99999). Power drops to 0.8420 at the 0.5 vs 0.6 keeping rates.