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Field
Experimental Design (Public)
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Before
We will post a short description of our study on Facebook and invite U.S. college students to participate in our study. We will explicitly state up front that the experiment includes discussion of socioeconomic and political topics, some of which may be sensitive. The main experiment will be conducted online in the following steps:
1. Baseline survey: We will recruit 500 participants. First, we will elicit students’ private beliefs on a set of socioeconomic and political topics, some of which are politically sensitive. Students can choose to answer “yes”/“no” and can also provide a one-sentence explanation of their beliefs. Students will also be incentivized to guess how other students privately answer each topic. We will also collect demographic data. All information collected in the survey will be kept private.
2. Randomly split participants into two subsamples of 100 and 400 people respectively. The 100 participants first choose whether to post their opinions publicly on an online message forum created by us on Slack (or zoom rooms). As admins of the those group chats, we will control display settings, such as hiding participant emails and editing participant’s full name and display name so that they are uniform.
3. Public expression (100 participants): the 100 participants will be asked the same topics asked in the baseline survey and each respondent can choose to answer publicly “yes”, “no”, or skip the question. They can also choose to provide explanations of their beliefs.
4. Randomize into information treatments: For the remaining 400 participants, we will randomize participants into one of two information treatments where we provide summary statistics about the public expression of the 100 participants.
5. Follow-up survey: After the information treatment, we will elicit students’ private beliefs on the same set of socioeconomic and political topics. We will also elicit second-order beliefs within their specific groups.
6. Randomization into new discussion groups: Based on the information treatment assignments, we will randomize participants into two groups of all control individuals and all treatment individuals.
7. Public Expression (400 participants): In these two groups with all control or all treatment individuals, students will again be asked the same topics. Participants will make public expression decisions in two rounds. In each round, half of the participants can choose to answer publicly “yes”, “no” or skip the question and provide explanations for their beliefs, and the other half will act as “observers”.
8. Endline survey (actions): After the public expressions and information treatments, we will ask all respondents whether they are willing to take certain political expression actions, such as signing a petition or donating to a charitable cause.
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After
We will conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment through Xlab with UC Berkeley students.
Our study consists of two parts, “first movers” (10% of participants) and “second movers” (90% of participants), which allows us to study the dynamic effects of increasing attention on silence on political expression and action. Specifically, all respondents will participate in Zoom sessions where they have the opportunity to express their views on various political and socioeconomic topics. However, “first movers” will participate in these Zoom sessions without any additional information while “second movers” will first receive anonymized summaries of the views expressed by “first movers” before participating in their own Zoom discussions. To isolate the causal effects of increasing attention to silence, we will randomly assign "second movers" to different information treatment groups where they see different summary statistics about "first movers". We will also ask all participants to complete a baseline survey (prior to the Zoom sessions) about their private views on these topics and their beliefs about the views of other participants as well as an endline survey (after the Zoom sessions) that again elicits beliefs about the views of other participants as well as willingness to engage in other types of political expression and action.
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