Primary Outcomes (explanation)
1) Beliefs
We elicit people’s prior and posterior beliefs about immigration (before and after the treatments). We ask five questions about statistical facts. First, we ask the percentage of foreigners in the population residing in Italy. Second, we ask them to estimate the percentage of foreigners among people reported to the judicial authority. Furthermore, we ask the percentage of (i) petty theft (ii) murder (iii) sexual assault among crimes committed by foreigners. In these three cases we also provide the corresponding percentages for natives as a benchmark. Participants answer these five questions using an open-ended format.
2) Emotions
After reading the article, participants are asked to report their emotions. We present participants with a list of seven emotions and ask them on a scale from 1 to 7 how strongly they felt each emotion while reading the article. We chose seven basic emotions: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise. All emotions were presented in the same screen and the order in which the emotions were presented was randomized across participants.
We will use two measures of emotions. The first will be constructed as the average of all the negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, contempt). We will also construct a `‘negative emotional valence" variable as the difference between negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, contempt) and positive ones (joy and surprise), standardized to take values between -1 and 1, with higher values representing a more negative emotional state, and 0 a perfect balance between positive and negative emotions.
3) Attitudes towards immigration
We elicit attitudes towards migration using three questions. The first question asks whether the number of migrants arriving in Italy every year should be reduced a lot/reduced a bit/left unchanged/increased a bit/increased a lot. The second is taken from the European Social Survey and asks whether the arrival of immigrants from different countries has made Italy a better or a worse place to live on a scale from 0 to 10.
Finally, we ask whether participants would like to sign a petition to the Italian Parliament. They could select one of the following three options: (a) I would like to sign a petition to increase the number of residence permits issued each year to foreigners (b) I would like to sign a petition to reduce the number of residence permits issued each year to foreigners (c) I am not willing to sign any petition. We will use all three attitudes as outcome variables of interest.