Managing Identity

Last registered on May 11, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Managing Identity
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0018544
Initial registration date
May 03, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
May 11, 2026, 7:56 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
United States of America
Region

Primary Investigator

Name
Katherine Coffman
Affiliation
Harvard Business School
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Chiara Aina
PI Affiliation
UPF
Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-05-04
End date
2026-05-22
Keywords
Behavior
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
J16, D91
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract

We are studying the “self-narratives” people hold: how they view themselves in terms of what they are good at and what is important to them, with a focus on how people manage these self-narratives in response to new information. We plan to collect both open-ended and more structured measures of individuals’ self-narratives by asking participants how they view different self-aspects of their identity: their intellectual self-aspect, their relational self-aspect, and their creative self-aspect. We will explore how these self-narratives correlate with objective measures of skill and individuals’ beliefs about their skills, as well as whether these self-narratives vary by gender. We will then expose some participants to feedback on their intellectual skills and use exogenous variation in the feedback to understand how individuals manage their self-narratives in response to new information. Does negative feedback in the intellectual self-aspect lead to less identification with that self-aspect, and more identification with other self-aspects?
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Aina, Chiara and Katherine Coffman. 2026. "Managing Identity." AEA RCT Registry. May 11. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18544-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Participants will complete a single 20-minute survey.

In Part 1, they will answer questions related to how they see themselves, including an open-ended, audio-recorded question and more structured questions that ask them how they would describe themselves.

In Part 2, participants will complete a skills test in each of the three self-aspect domains (intellectual, relational, creative). Each test consists of 12 multiple-choice questions with 30- seconds allotted for each question. After, we will ask them questions about how they believed they performed both in absolute and relative terms.

Participants are then randomly assigned to one of three treatments:
No Feedback: Participants receive no feedback on their performance on the intellectual test.
Partial Easy: Participants are told how they performed on 6 of the 12 intellectual test questions, chosen ex-ante to be easier questions on average.
Partial Hard: Participants are told how they performed on 6 of the 12 intellectual test questions, chosen ex-ante to be harder questions on average.

In Part 3, participants answer more detailed questions related to how they see themselves across the different self-aspects. They also provide updated beliefs about how they performed on the tests from Part 2.

In Part 4, they will answer demographic questions.
Intervention Start Date
2026-05-08
Intervention End Date
2026-05-22

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Our primary measures aim to capture self-narratives across three self-aspects (SA) after treatment: intellectual, relational, and creative. We do this with a battery of key questions:

SA RANK – This refers to the forced ranking an individual gives to the SA after treatment, where they are asked to rank the self-aspect that feels most important to them as number 1.
SA SHARE – This refers to the zero-sum share that an individual gives to the SA after treatment, where they are asked, relative to each other, how important each SA is to what makes you, “you,” today.
SA WORDS – This refers to the number of words from the SA category that an individual chooses in the word selection task after treatment. In this task, individuals are asked to select from a list of 24 different words (8 from each SA) all words that they would choose to describe themselves.
SA BUBBLE – Individuals are asked after treatment how big a part each SA is to their overall identity on 1 - 7 scale.
SA IDEAL TIME – Individuals are asked after treatment how they would ideally allocate their leisure time in a typical week across the considered SAs.

In addition to these measures of identity, we are also interested in the beliefs individuals hold about their abilities in each SA post-treatment.

SA Belief of Absolute Performance – Guess of their 12-question score on the multiple-choice SA test, post-treatment.
SA Belief of Broader Skills – Self-assessment of their broader skills in that SA on a 1 - 7 scale where 1 is extremely weak and 7 is extremely strong.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
In addition to our primary self-narrative measures, we have a few additional measures that also aim to capture identity but in more nuanced, naturalistic ways that may be less susceptible to demand effects.
In the first part of the study, we ask individuals to describe themselves in an open-ended question. We will use an LLM to analyze the extent to which these descriptions seem to reflect intellectual, relational, and creative aspects of their identity.
Later in the study, we ask individuals to choose from a list of 6 possible books (2 for each SA) which book they would be most interested in. Because we randomly select some participants to indeed receive the e-book format of the book they choose, this is an incentivized measure of identity.

We plan to see how these two measures correlate with our other measures of identity.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Participants will complete a single 20-minute survey.

In Part 1, they will answer questions related to how they see themselves, including an open-ended, audio-recorded question and more structured questions that ask them how they would describe themselves.

In Part 2, participants will complete a skills test in each of the three self-aspect domains (intellectual, relational, creative). Each test consists of 12 multiple-choice questions with 30- seconds allotted for each question. After, we will ask them questions about how they believed they performed both in absolute and relative terms.

Participants are then randomly assigned to one of three treatments:
No Feedback: Participants receive no feedback on their performance on the intellectual test.
Partial Easy: Participants are told how they performed on 6 of the 12 intellectual test questions, chosen ex-ante to be easier questions on average.
Partial Hard: Participants are told how they performed on 6 of the 12 intellectual test questions, chosen ex-ante to be harder questions on average.

In Part 3, participants answer more detailed questions related to how they see themselves across the different self-aspects. They also provide updated beliefs about how they performed on the tests from Part 2.

In Part 4, they will answer demographic questions.


See uploaded document for experimental materials.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization will be done by the experimental program (Qualtrics). We will stratify based upon the initial ranking of self-aspects provided (two groups: ranked intellectual first, or ranked intellectual second/third).
Randomization Unit
Individual level
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1800 participants
Sample size: planned number of observations
1800 participants
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
600 in each of three treatments
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Harvard Business School
IRB Approval Date
2026-04-03
IRB Approval Number
IRB26-0374
Analysis Plan

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