Abstract This paper provides representative evidence on beliefs about racial discrimination and examines whether information causally affects support for pro-black policies. Eliciting quantitative beliefs about the extent of hiring discrimination against blacks, we uncover large disagreement about the extent of racial discrimination with particularly pronounced partisan differences. An information treatment leads to a convergence in beliefs about racial discrimination but does not lead to a similar convergence in support of pro-black policies. The results demonstrate that while providing information can substantially reduce disagreement about the extent of racial discrimination, it is not sufficient to reduce disagreement about pro-black policies.

Information provision experiments allow researchers to test economic theories and answer policy-relevant questions by varying the information set available to respondents. We survey the emerging literature using information provision experiments in economics and discuss applications in macroeconomics, finance, political economy, public economics, labor economics, and health economics. We also discuss design considerations and provide best-practice recommendations on how to (i) measure beliefs; (ii) design the information intervention; (iii) measure belief updating; (iv) deal with potential confounds, such as experimenter demand effects; and (v) recruit respondents using online panels. We finally discuss typical effect sizes and provide sample size recommendations.(JEL C90, D83, D91)

Abstract The rise of opinion programs has transformed television news. Because they present anchors’ subjective commentary and analysis, opinion programs often convey conflicting narratives about reality. We experimentally document that people across the ideological spectrum turn to opinion programs over “straight news”, even when provided large incentives to learn objective facts. We then examine the consequences of diverging narratives between opinion programs in a high-stakes setting: the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We find stark differences in the adoption of preventative behaviours among viewers of the two most popular opinion programs, both on the same network, which adopted opposing narratives about the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We then show that areas with greater relative viewership of the program downplaying the threat experienced a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our evidence suggests that opinion programs may distort important beliefs and behaviours.

We survey the recent literature in economics using open-ended survey data to uncover mechanisms behind economic beliefs and behaviors. We first provide an overview of different applications, including the measurement of motives, mental models, narratives, attention, information transmission, and recall. We next describe different ways of eliciting open-ended responses, including single-item open-ended questions, speech recordings, and artificial intelligence–powered qualitative interviews. Subsequently, we discuss methods to annotate and analyze such data with a focus on recent advances in large language models. Our review concludes with a discussion of promising avenues for future research. (JEL C83, C90, D83, D91)

Abstract Standard labor market models assume that workers hold accurate beliefs about the external wage distribution, and hence their outside options with other employers. We test this assumption by comparing German workers’ beliefs about outside options with objective benchmarks. First, we find that workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage: workers that would experience a 10% wage change if switching to their outside option only expect a 1% change. Second, workers in low-paying firms underestimate wages elsewhere. Third, in response to information about the wages of similar workers, respondents correct their beliefs about their outside options and change their job search and wage negotiation intentions. Finally, we analyze the consequences of anchoring in a simple equilibrium model. In the model, anchored beliefs keep overly pessimistic workers stuck in low-wage jobs, which gives rise to monopsony power and labor market segmentation.

Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings high-light the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist. (JEL D62, D83, D91, L82, Z13)

We conduct a field experiment with US households to study how expectations about long-run home price growth shape spending decisions. We exogenously vary survey respondents' expectations by providing different expert forecasts. Homeowners' spending, measured using rich home-scanner data, is inelastic to home price expectations. By contrast, renters reduce their spending when expecting higher home price growth. These patterns reflect positive wealth effects for owners from higher future wealth and negative income effects for both groups due to higher future housing costs. Our study highlights consequences of asset price growth and long-term expectations about the economy for household behavior. (JEL C93, D12, D84, D91, G51, R31)

Abstract For many decisions, we encounter relevant information over the course of days, months, or years. We consume such information in various forms, including stories (qualitative content about individual instances) and statistics (quantitative data about collections of observations). This article proposes that information type—story versus statistic—shapes selective memory. In controlled experiments, we document a pronounced story-statistic gap in memory: the average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73% over the course of a day, but the impact of a story fades by only 32%. Guided by a model of selective memory, we disentangle different mechanisms and document that similarity relationships drive this gap. Recall of a story increases when its qualitative content is more similar to a memory prompt. Irrelevant information in memory that is similar to the prompt, on the other hand, competes for retrieval with relevant information, impeding successful recall.

Abstract Dissent plays an important role in any society, but dissenters are often silenced through social sanctions. Beyond their persuasive effects, rationales providing arguments supporting dissenters’ causes can increase the public expression of dissent by providing a “social cover” for voicing otherwise stigmatized positions. Motivated by a simple theoretical framework, we experimentally show that liberals are more willing to post a tweet opposing the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when their tweet implies they had first read credible scientific evidence supporting their position. Analogous experiments with conservatives demonstrate that the same mechanisms facilitate anti-immigrant expression. Our findings highlight both the power of rationales and their limitations in enabling dissent and shed light on phenomena such as social movements, political correctness, propaganda, and antiminority behavior.

Abstract We conduct a natural field experiment with a major European party to test whether giving party supporters more voice increases their engagement in the party’s electoral campaign. In the experiment, the party asked a random subset of supporters for their opinions on the importance of different policy areas. Giving supporters opportunities to voice their opinions increases their engagement in the campaign as measured using behavioral data from the party’s smartphone application. Survey data reveals that giving voice also increases other margins of campaign effort as well as perceived voice. Our evidence highlights the importance of voice for increasing political engagement.