Sexual orientation discrimination: An information provision experiment

2022-02-26

2022-03-01

The study contains three main outcome variables:
(i) the average amount allocated to a male homosexual profile,
(ii) the average amount allocated to a female homosexual profile,
(iii) support for LGBT-related policies.

The study contains the following secondary outcomes:
(i) the average amount allocated to a female heterosexual profile,
(ii) the extent of belief updating about the etiology of sexual orientation for the Nature group, i.e. whether participants in the Nature group change their beliefs about the etiology of sexual orientation (biological vs other factors) after the information treatment.

Participants are randomly assigned into one of three groups of the experiment. There are two treatment groups (Nature, Religion) and one control group (Control).
Nature group receives an information treatment: they are asked to read about the biological causes of homosexuality (a short summary of Blanchard, 2001). Religion group receives a prime: they are asked four religiosity-related questions. Control is passive.
To measure discrimination, we employ a bystander money allocation game. In this game, participants are asked to allocate a given amount of money between two recipients, who may be generally perceived to be similar, but differ in one specific characteristic - sexual orientation. We signal sexual orientation by manipulating partners' names. For illustration, one recipient in a bystander task is Ivan, whose partner's name is Alina, another recipient is Maksim, whose partner's name is Aleksandr, thus signaling that Ivan is heterosexual and Maksim is homosexual.
The recipient group consists of 10 people, who we recruit. They provide us information on the following: their name, partner's name, gender, age, education and job position. Then we create recipient profiles according to this information. In particular, we keep gender, age, education and job title, and we change a name and a partner's name. Names are assigned to the recipient profiles randomly from a Russian name list.

Hypothesis 1: Sexual orientation discrimination is prevalent: On average, all groups allocate less money to homosexual profiles vs heterosexual profiles.
Hypothesis 2: On average, Nature group allocates more money to homosexual profiles compared to Control group.
Hypothesis 3: On average, Religion group allocates less money to homosexual profiles compared to Control group.


We plan to perform heterogeneity analysis based on 3 characteristics:
1. religiousness: we expect that the effects of religious priming will be larger for religious participants compared to non-religious participants;
2. prior beliefs: we expect that effects of the information treatment will be larger for participants who hold more malleable prior beliefs about the etiology of sexual orientation, e.g. to the question whether sexual orientation is predetermined by biological factors vs other factors, they answer 60%:40%, correspondingly, rather than 0%:100%. Information treatment may be persuasive to individuals who hold initially positive beliefs/attitudes and less persuasive to those with initially negative beliefs/attitudes towards sexual minority groups (biased information assimilation);
3. political views: we expect larger treatment effects for liberals compared to conservatives.

This does not preclude other/further heterogeneity analyses.

Randomization is done via Qualtrics.

Individual

No

-

N = 3000 (1000 participant per group), representative on age and gender.

1000