Experimental Design
Regardless of the treatment he/she is assigned to, each participant will be asked to fill in an online questionnaire which encompasses three sections. In Section 1, participants will be presented with a vignette presenting a fictitious mayoral race in a small Italian town they have just moved to; participants will watch a 60s video (recorded with professional actors) from each of the two main candidates and will then be asked to express their intention to vote for either candidate. They will also be asked to express what candidate they perceive to be most confidence of his electoral success and, focusing on the candidate whose video message is our experimental manipulation, they will be asked how they perceive this candidate's ideological leaning and overall ability to be in office. In Section 2, participants will be asked three standard non-incentivized/self-reported questions on their ideological position, their propensity to trust others, and their propensity to cooperate with others. At this point in the survey, we will insert a screener question to evaluate a participant's attention to the instruction (a translation to the Italian setting of a question from Berinksi, Margolis, Sances 2014). Finally, in Section 3, we will measure 4 behavioral traits which we believe can account for heterogeneous treatment effects with standard methodologies from experimental economics that incentivize responses with monetary rewards. First, we will measure participants' competitiveness (that is, the propensity to self-select into a tournament) and overconfidence (that is, the accuracy of a self-assessment of own's own relative performance in a tournament) using tasks commonly employed the literature on gender and competitiveness (for example, Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007 or Buser, Niederle and Oosterbeek, 2014; the main difference with these studies is that we ask participants to find how many times a certain letter appears in a string of 50 random letters rather than asking them to find the sum of 3 or 4 random numbers of 2 digits). Second, we measure participants' degree of risk aversion asking them to choose 1 among 6 lotteries, a task introduced by Eckel and Grossman (2008). Finally, we measure participants' propensity to cooperate, using a standard game of voluntary provision of a public good. The average duration of the survey will be around 20 minutes and the average compensation will be around €4 (€2.5 of participation fee and €1.5 based on performance in the games described above).