Can monuments to victims of authoritarian regimes promote more tolerant societies? We look into the case of Stolpersteine, small memorials commemorating victims of the Nazi regime in Germany. Unlike other monuments, Stolpersteine are dedicated to specific individuals who were victims of Nazi violence. In a pre-registered survey experiment, we showed treated individuals pictures of the stones. Our results show that exposure to Stolpersteine strongly increased negative emotions and reduced positive ones. The results on attitudinal and quasi-behavioral outcomes are mixed, likely driven by ceiling effects. We find a positive effect on tolerance toward the only minority group that faces low tolerance in the control group. However, there is no statistically significant effect for other groups.

The justifiably famous “Asian disease” experiment (ADE) by Tversky and Kahneman established that choices involving uncertainty can be dependent on framing. Description emphasizing gains induced much higher preference for choices in which outcomes were described as certain rather than probabilistic, as compared to description emphasizing losses. The vignette for the ADE involved disease mitigation, and the COVID pandemic gave it much-enhanced realism and immediacy. An attempt to replicate the ADE during the pandemic, however, failed to produce the original results. Other, contemporaneous replications, by contrast, matched the original, leaving open the question of when such framing effects occur.

Americans increasingly confront policy messages not from high-profile political figures but from everyday citizens. Much is known about the effects of racial source cues from well-known political figures with salient racial identities. Less is known about how subtle racial cues from non-recognizable sources affect Americans’ support for policies that are race-targeted and those that are not. In this paper, I conduct a randomized experiment that varies a cue of the source’s racial identity and the type of policy for which the source advocates. I uncover little evidence for the hypothesis that subtle racial source cues activate racial attitudes that lead Americans to racialize policies that are (at least explicitly) race-neutral. I find instead that subtle cues of a Black vs. White source decrease support only for race-targeted policies. I reason that two mechanisms possibly driving this effect are: (1) subtle racial source cues become salient for only race-targeted policies, thereby activating racial stereotypes for these policies but not others, and (2) Black sources are perceived as less objective policy messengers when the policy explicitly aims to rectify injustices against Black Americans. More generally, the paper’s overall findings suggest that subtle racial cues of who advocates for race-targeted policies matter for whether such policies can garner the public support they presumably need to come to fruition.

This paper examines the effectiveness of media literacy interventions in countering misinformation among in-transit migrants in Mexico and Colombia. We conducted experiments to assess whether well-known strategies for fighting misinformation are effective for this understudied yet particularly vulnerable population. We evaluate the impact of digital media literacy tips on migrants’ ability to identify false information and their intentions to share migration-related content. We find that these interventions can effectively decrease migrants’ intentions to share misinformation. We also find suggestive evidence that asking participants to consider accuracy may inadvertently influence their sharing behavior by acting as a behavioral nudge, rather than simply eliciting their sharing intentions. Additionally, the interventions reduced trust in social media as an information source while maintaining trust in official channels. The findings suggest that incorporating digital literacy tips into official websites could be a cost-effective strategy to reduce misinformation circulation among migrant populations.

Globally, prejudicial attitudes toward women persist. By taking anti-discriminatory stances, value-oriented organizations – e.g., political parties and religious denominations – can tap into group identities to shape their members’ attitudes. We know much less about the role of organizations that are not inherently value-oriented – such as sports teams – in accomplishing the same. Yet, as various campaigns by sports teams worldwide indicate, this is precisely what non-value-oriented organizations increasingly attempt to do. Can football team fandom be leveraged to promote gender-egalitarian attitudes? We address this question with data from a national survey in Brazil and a survey experiment conducted in partnership with a major Brazilian football club. We find that while football team identity is salient and may be leveraged to change displayed social attitudes, the Club’s anti-sexism campaign inadvertently increased men’s expressed prejudice toward women in football – although it may have also improved institutional trust among women.

Who do we blame when bad things happen? Has division in American society made us less sympathetic to victims of tragedies? In previous trying times (e.g., 9/11 and Columbine), Americans rallied together to support victims and seek government solutions. In a highly polarized era, however, we have witnessed further division rather than unity. In this paper, I leverage original, pre-registered survey experiments to examine how much Americans blame and sympathize with someone who has tragically died from COVID-19. The studies find consistent evidence that partisans blame victims who hold an anti-vaccine perspective, regardless of partisanship. Less consistent evidence suggests that Democrats also blame victims who were Republican, but less than they do victims who held anti-vaccination views. Further, partisans are less sympathetic when the victim was anti-vaccine, but Democrats and Republicans are also less sympathetic when the person who died was an outpartisan. These results indicate that animosity towards outpartisans persists even through tragedy, but demonstrates limits to affective partisan polarization paired with evidence of rational blame and sympathy responses.

As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.

A prominent paradigm demonstrates many White Americans respond negatively to information on their declining population share. But this paradigm considers this “racial shift” in a single hierarchy-challenging context that produces similar status threat responses across conceptually distinct outcomes, undercutting the ability to both explain the causes of Whites’ social and political responses and advance theorizing about native majorities’ responses to demographic change. We test whether evidence for Whites’ responses to demographic change varies across three distinct hierarchy-challenging contexts: society at large, culture, and politics. We find little evidence any racial shift information instills status threat or otherwise changes attitudes or behavioral intentions, and do not replicate evidence for reactions diverging by left- versus right-wing political attachments. We conclude with what our well-powered (n = 2100) results suggest about a paradigm and intervention used prominently, with results cited frequently, to understand native majorities’ responses to demographic change and potential challenges to multiracial democracy.

The US public is mostly ignorant about basic immigration knowledge. While various attempts to correct misperceptions have generally failed to change people’s minds about the issue, it is possible that this failure has been the result of not providing relevant information. We argue that informing the public about the difficulty of the legal immigration admission process is an effective, perspective-changing way to raise support for more open immigration policies. We test and confirm this hypothesis using a nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 1000) that informs respondents about US immigration’s administrative burdens and restrictions through short verifiable narratives. We also provide the first evidence of the widespread ignorance about the immigration process across diverse political and demographic groups. Our results suggest that providing a better understanding of the immigration process’ difficulty has more promise to change public policy preferences than challenging skeptics’ crystallized beliefs about immigration’s effects or numbers.

Radical right behavior and support for radical right parties have increased across many countries in recent decades. A growing body of research has argued that, similar to the spread of other extremist behaviors, this is due to an erosion of political norms. This suggests that re-stigmatizing radical right parties might be an effective way of countering their growth. We use a survey experiment in Spain that compares the effectiveness of three theory-driven interventions aimed at increasing political stigma against a radical right party. Contrary to expectations, we fail to validate the efficacy of vignette-based attempts at stigmatization, instead identifying some backlash effects. Methodologically, our findings underscore the importance of validating treatments, as we show that simple attempts at re-stigmatization can produce null or opposing effects to their intended purpose. Theoretically, our results support the idea that normalization is a “one-way street,” in that re-stigmatizing parties is difficult after a party has become normalized.

Recent studies suggest that online abuse directed at politicians can have negative effects on their public engagement and continued participation in politics. This article considers the broader consequences of such online abuse by testing whether exposure to online abuse of politicians also decreases the prospective political participation of ordinary citizens. In a preregistered survey experiment with 2,000 participants from Denmark, we find that exposing citizens to cases of online abuse of politicians does not have any statistically significant, or substantively meaningful, negative effects on citizens’ prospective political participation. This result holds across multiple measures of political participation and when distinguishing citizens by their gender and level of conflict avoidance. If anything, exploratory analyses indicate that online abuse of politicians may in some cases mobilize citizens who have been bystanders to such abuse.

How can states credibly commit to peace and assure other countries? One source of credible assurance identified in previous studies is the cost to a state’s international reputation. When a state violates a prior commitment to peace, it suffers reputational damage, which can be costly in various ways. These reputational costs, in turn, serve as a tying-hands signal that enhances the credibility of peaceful commitments. Nonetheless, empirical research on whether and under what conditions such reputation costs arise remains limited. To address this gap, this study conducts a preregistered survey experiment in the United States, using a hypothetical scenario involving military buildups by China and Japan. The results indicate that violating commitments to peace undermines the credibility of future commitments, particularly when the violator is a rival country. These findings suggest that, with some limitations, international reputation costs can serve as a reliable mechanism for ensuring the credibility of assurances.

Mounting research finds that shared discrimination boosts solidarity between people of color (PoC), with downstream increases in support for pro-outgroup policies. However, these experiments measure the proposed mediator (solidarity), rather than manipulate it, which raises reasonable doubts about its causal impact. We report two pre-registered experiments (N = 2,692) that reassess solidarity’s causal influence by “blocking” its downstream effects. We conducted these studies with Black adults – the prototypical person of color who define this mega-group’s norms and values. Both studies focus on Black-Latino relations and reveal that manipulating shared discrimination between these groups heartily boosts Black solidarity with PoC (d∼.40). Critically, after solidarity’s activation, manipulating differences in the bases of discrimination against Black and Latino people (i.e., slavery versus immigration) modestly reduces its downstream effect on Black support for pro-Latino policies. A pre-registered internal meta-analysis finds this “blockage” effect is modest but statistically reliable (d∼.10), leading us to conclude that solidarity’s mediating influence is likely causal and resistant to this divisive threat. We discuss our results’ implications for inter-minority politics.

Despite general public support, efforts to build affordable housing often encounter stiff resistance due to “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) attitudes, which are often rooted in false or unsupported beliefs about affordable housing and its impacts on surrounding communities. Would correcting these misperceptions increase support for building affordable housing? To answer this question, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment measuring how support for affordable housing in the U.S. varies at different distances from where respondents live (one-eighth of a mile away, two miles away, or in their state). Our results indicate that correcting stereotypes about affordable housing and misperceptions about its effects increase support for affordable housing. Contrary to expectations, these effects are often larger for affordable housing near the respondent’s home (rather than at the state level), suggesting that debunking myths about affordable housing may help to counter NIMBY attitudes.

Scholars increasingly conceptualize populism by whether politicians use people-centric and anti-elite appeals that pit a homogeneous people against a corrupt elite. These appeals reflect “thin” ideology because they offer no programmatic content and thus politicians must pair these appeals with more substantive positions, termed their “host” (or thick) ideology, which often consists of nativism on the right (e.g., espousing anti-immigrant positions) and socialism on the left (e.g., prioritizing redistribution). An emerging literature has thus sought to estimate whether populists garner support due to their thin ideology or their substantive host ideology. To date, no research has validated whether populism treatments (1) truly operationalize populist thin ideology, and (2) do so without manipulating host ideology. Results from three conjoint validation experiments fielded in both the United States and the United Kingdom show that thin ideology treatments successfully manipulate the underlying concepts but caution that some operationalizations also affect perceptions of host ideology.

Do men respond to a masculinity threat by adopting more conservative political attitudes? A highly cited 2013 study by Willer et al. – drawing on substantial work in social psychology – argues in the affirmative, reasoning that endorsing conservative views allows men to reaffirm their gender identity. In two experiments with student convenience samples (Ntotal 100–110, Nmen 40–51), the authors find consistent evidence: inducing masculinity threat increases support for war, homophobic attitudes, and endorsement of dominance hierarchies. We conduct a preregistered replication of this foundational study using a nationally representative probability sample (Ntotal 2774, Nmen 2073). Contrary to original findings, we observe no consistent evidence that masculinity threat alters political attitudes. We further do not find support for design differences between the replication and original study driving contrasting findings. Our results call into question the robustness of evidence linking masculinity threat to political attitudes and underscore the importance of re-evaluating widely accepted findings with representative, large samples.

Scholarship has identified key determinants of people’s belief in misinformation predominantly from English-language contexts. However, multilingual citizens often consume news media in multiple languages. We study how the language of consumption affects belief in misinformation and true news articles in multilingual environments. We suggest that language may pass on specific cues affecting how bilinguals evaluate information. In a ten-week survey experiment with bilingual adults in Ukraine, we measured if subjects evaluating information in their less-preferred language were less likely to believe it. We find those who prefer Ukrainian are less likely to believe both false and true stories written in Russian by approximately 0.2 standard deviation units. Conversely, those who prefer Russian show increased belief in false stories in Ukrainian, though this effect is less robust. A secondary digital media literacy intervention does not increase discernment as it reduces belief in both true and false stories equally.

The literature in political science considers (sometimes inaccurate) perceptions of immigrants as a factor in anti-immigration attitudes among natives, but much less is known about perceptions regarding immigrants from specific regions. In this paper, I explore Americans’ perceptions about immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. To measure these perceptions, I apply a conjoint experiment with a multinomial outcome, in which respondents are asked to categorize hypothetical immigrants as coming from one of the five regions. Results from a nationally diverse sample demonstrate that immigrants from all regions other than Europe are associated with speaking poor English. Immigrants from Latin America are also associated with welfare dependency and rule-breaking behavior, while the opposite is true for immigrants from Asia. These negative perceptions may at least partly explain opposition to non-European, and specifically Latin American, immigration in the United States.

Solar geoengineering offers a speculative means to cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation into space. While some research suggests that awareness of solar geoengineering could reduce public support for decarbonization through a moral hazard mechanism, other studies indicate that it could serve as a “clarion call” that motivates further action. Using a pre-registered factorial design, we assess how sharing balanced information on solar geoengineering affects attitudes toward decarbonization policies and climate attitudes among 2,509 US residents. We do not find that solar geoengineering information affects support for decarbonization on average, though it may increase support among initially less supportive subgroups; moreover, this information tends to increase the perception that climate change is a daunting problem that cannot be resolved without decarbonization. Our results suggest that concerns about moral hazard should not discourage research on solar geoengineering – as long as the public encounters realistic messages about solar geoengineering’s role.

Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental gains, but the treatment effect size was smaller because of increases in the control condition. We examine four possible explanations for this pattern. First, we find considerable evidence of an incumbency effect among women in one treatment condition. Second, increases in women’s representation in the control condition appear to be related in part to larger turnout during the 2016 election cycle. Finally, we find little evidence of lasting attitude changes about women’s representation and few traces of post-experimental spillover.