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Field
Abstract
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Before
The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened many human lives and economic activities in the world. Governments worldwide took several measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus including law-, military-, and/or technology-enforced lock-downs. However, not all the governments immediately took such ``hard" measures, but some, such as Sweden and Japan, took ``soft" measures, e.g., providing political messages to citizens so that they take self-restraint actions on their own.
Despite the flood of administrative messages asking for self-restraints of staying home, and the emergency declaration by the government on April the 7th, since there are no practical fines against violations in the Japanese legal system, there are people who would not comply. This situation has become a social issue and revealed how difficult it is for a government to guide citizens by providing advisory messages even when the whole society obviously benefits in the long run by following them.
With this circumstance in Japan, this study conducts a Randomized Controlled Trial experiment to investigate causal effects of information provisions to individuals on their self-restraint behaviors with consideration of two novel features in our messages. The first feature we test is the power of the Royals over the political authority. The second one to be examined is the power of personalized messages over commonly shared slogans. We will test if those new features could enhance self-restraint behaviors among Japanese citizens.
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After
The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened many human lives and economic activities in the world. Governments worldwide took several measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus including law-, military-, and/or technology-enforced lock-downs. However, not all the governments immediately took such ``hard" measures, but some, such as Sweden and Japan, took ``soft" measures, e.g., providing political messages to citizens so that they take self-restraint actions on their own.
Despite the flood of administrative messages asking for self-restraint of leaving home, and the emergency declaration by the government on April the 7th, since there are no practical fines against the violations, there are some people who would not comply. This situation has become a social issue and has revealed how difficult it is for a government to guide citizens by providing advisory messages even though the whole society obviously benefits in the long run by following them.
With this circumstance in Japan, this study conducts a Randomized Controlled Trial experiment to investigate causal effects of information provisions to individuals on their self-restraint behaviors with consideration of two novel features in our messages. The first feature we test is the power of the Royals over the political authority. The second one to be examined is the power of personalized messages over commonly shared slogans. We will test if those new features could enhance self-restraint behaviors among Japanese citizens.
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Field
Experimental Design (Public)
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Before
We conduct randomized information manipulations, exploiting a 2-by-2 factorial design.
First, we have two conditions regarding the sender of the messages on self-restraint behaviors. Specifically, we consider the political authority (the current prime minister) and the current Emperor as the ones who send messages. Since there is already a flood of administrative messages on staying home at the time of the experiment, we consider the condition of the political authority to be our control group. In Japan, the Imperial Family is well-respected and is supposed to be the ``symbol" of Japan. As such, even without any political power with him, the Emperor can influence the society with his messages. As such, we will treat this condition as our treatment, and test the symbolic power of the Royals.
In both cases, the senders of messages hope that the society will overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. For the sake of the salience of the experiment, we choose actual statements made by either sender before our experiment set off, rather than we make up fictional messages. Those messages come with drawing images of the senders in order to enhance the reality of the messages.
Next, we have two conditions regarding personalized messages. When you are in ``NO" condition, you will receive some common information for everybody, just as it is happening in the real world. When you are in ``Yes" condition, you will receive personalized messages. Those personalized messages contain information of their own hours of outings from the previous week, together with the median value of outing hours for the rest of participants. As such, from the messages it is easy for our participants to grasp where they stand in the distributions of outing hours. The aim of our personalized massages is to make the information in the society more salient to individuals, thereby promoting responsible behaviors on their own.
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After
We conduct randomized information manipulations, exploiting a 2-by-2 factorial design.
First, we have two conditions regarding the sender of the messages on self-restraint behaviors. Specifically, we consider the political authority (the current prime minister) and the current Emperor as the ones who send messages. Since there is already a flood of administrative messages on staying home at the time of the experiment, we consider the condition of the political authority to be our control group. In Japan, the Imperial Family is well-respected and is supposed to be the ``symbol" of Japan. As such, even without any political power with him, the Emperor can influence the society with his messages. Therefore, we will treat this condition as our treatment, and test the symbolic power of the Royals.
In both cases, the senders of messages hope that the society will overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. For the sake of the salience of the experiment, we choose actual statements made by either sender before our experiment set off, rather than we make up fictional messages. Those messages come with drawing images of the senders in order to enhance the reality of the messages.
Next, we have two conditions regarding personalized messages. If participants are in ``NO" condition, they will receive some common information for everybody, just as it is happening in the real world. Instead, if participants are in ``Yes" condition, they will receive personalized messages. Those personalized messages contain information of their own hours of outings from the previous week, together with the median value of outing hours for the rest of participants. As such, from the messages it is easy for our participants to grasp where they stand in the distributions of outing hours. The aim of our personalized massages is to make the information in the society more salient to individuals, thereby promoting responsible behaviors on their own.
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