Back to History

Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Trial End Date August 18, 2024 August 23, 2024
Last Published August 14, 2024 02:41 PM August 18, 2024 03:41 AM
Intervention End Date August 18, 2024 August 23, 2024
Experimental Design (Public) We construct a survey experiment with five main blocks: 1) the first block collects respondents' demographic information; 2) the second block measures the benchmark probability of war between the U.S. and China; 3) the third block is the intervention in which one of the three arms is randomly distributed to respondents; 4) the fourth block is about international relations between the U.S. and China, which mostly serves as manipulation checks for the intervention; and 5) the fifth block is about expectations regarding the macroeconomy and personal expectations and behavior. We construct a survey experiment with five main blocks: 1) the first block collects respondents' demographic information; 2) the second block measures the benchmark probability of war between the U.S. and China; 3) the third block is the intervention in which one of the three arms is randomly distributed to respondents; 4) the fourth block is about international relations between the U.S. and China, which mostly serves as manipulation checks for the intervention; and 5) the fifth block is about expectations regarding the macroeconomy and personal expectations and behavior. There will be three waves of data collection. Wave 1: We run the survey experiment as described above. Wave 2: We rerun the survey experiment, focusing only on the two treatment arms with different forecasts. This wave will also include an additional set of qualitative questions. The purpose of Wave 2 is twofold: to gather more data and to test for any number anchoring effects on the main quantitative questions. Wave 3: We conduct a placebo experiment where the survey items remain the same as in Wave 2, but the treatments with forecasts of the probability of war are replaced by treatments with the same numbers used in the previous waves but in irrelevant contexts. Specifically, in one treatment, we tell respondents that "3% of the total U.S. population are illegal immigrants." In the other treatment, we tell respondents that "83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas." These numbers are identical to those used in the earlier waves, but they are unrelated to international relations and macroeconomy. The purpose of Wave 3 is to determine whether the specific numbers used in the forecasts in the previous waves might have influenced respondents' answers due to anchoring effects, even when the numbers are irrelevant to the context of the survey.
Planned Number of Clusters 1002 individuals Wave 1: 1002 individuals Wave 2: 1000 individuals Wave 3: 1000 individuals
Planned Number of Observations 1002 individuals Wave 1: 1002 individuals Wave 2: 1000 individuals Wave 3: 1000 individuals
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms 334 individuals per treatment arm 334 individuals in the control arm; 834 in each treatment arm; 500 in each placebo treatment
Back to top