Mine, theirs or ours? An online experiment in citizens motivations to invest in mental health

Mental health spillovers have been documented in many settings, but it is unclear whether citizens are aware of their existence. This awareness is crucial, as perceiving mental health benefits as purely private can lead to systematic underinvestment in one’s own mental health. To address this, we design an experiment to assess different motivations for investing in mental health, accounting for participants’ beliefs. The goal is to understand how to better incentivize mental health investments.

Participants are exposed to one of three randomized information treatments:
1. Mental Health (Only): Provides general information about mental health issues to raise awareness.
2. Mental Health (Private): Frames mental health as a private issue, emphasizing personal benefits from mental health investments.
3. Mental Health (Social): Frames mental health as a societal issue, highlighting collective benefits from addressing mental health challenges.

Each treatment is supported by visual aids, such as images and graphs, to reinforce its message. These interventions are designed to evaluate how different framings affect participants’ willingness to cooperate in public goods production and donate to mental health initiatives.

2024-12-09

2024-12-18

Primary outcomes will be measured using a public good game and a donation game. These games identify two key outcomes: individuals’ willingness to cooperate for the production of public good and their preferences towards mental health programs, as proxied by donations
to mental health organizations.

Secondary outcomes will be measured using a list experiment and survey questions. The list experiment identifies potential stigma individuals attach to mental health. The survey questions will capture individuals’ self-reported first- and second-order beliefs, levels of social and institutional trust, social media usage, social capital, and perceptions of responsibility towards themselves and the others.

Participants are randomly assigned to receive information treatments (private, neutral, or societal perspectives), supported by images and graphs. The experiment consists of four main phases:
1. Public Goods Game: Participants, grouped in fours, allocate an initial endowment of 100 tokens in a standard Public Goods Game.
2. Donation Phase: Participants decide how much to donate from a 100-token endowment to projects focused on environmental protection, healthcare, education, and mental health.
3. List Experiment: To investigate potential stigma surrounding mental health, list experiments include sensitive items. Randomization ensures balanced exposure to control and treatment lists, allowing for analysis of individual variations.
4. Survey: A post-experiment survey gathers data on factors influencing outcomes, such as social trust, social capital, and perceptions of stigma.

Not available

Randomization by computer, within Qualtrics.

Individual level.

No

We will include 8260 individuals in our randomization, in 7 countries:France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, Spain,
Sweden.

We will include 8260 individuals in our randomization.

We planned to balance the control and treatment groups.

Our design consists of individuals from seven countries. Since we expect small effects from our treatments, with a target sample size of 1315 individuals for France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and 1000 for Latvia, Slovakia and Sweden (i.e., 8260 in total), we will be able to detect a minimum effect size ME=0.071 (7.1% of a standard deviation) at power p = 0.8 and alpha α = 0.05 over standardized outcomes.