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Placebo Selection in Survey Experiments: An Agnostic Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2021

Ethan Porter  and
Yamil R. Velez Open the ORCID record for Yamil R. Velez [Opens in a new window]
Ethan Porter
Affiliation:
School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA. Email: evporter@gwu.edu Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA Department of Political Science, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Yamil R. Velez*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 741 International Affairs Building, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: yrv2004@columbia.edu
*
Corresponding author Yamil R. Velez
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Abstract

Although placebo conditions are ubiquitous in survey experiments, little evidence guides common practices for their use and selection. How should scholars choose and construct placebos? First, we review the role of placebos in published survey experiments, finding that placebos are used inconsistently. Then, drawing on the medical literature, we clarify the role that placebos play in accounting for nonspecific effects (NSEs), or the effects of ancillary features of experiments. We argue that, in the absence of precise knowledge of NSEs that placebos are adjusting for, researchers should average over a corpus of many placebos. We demonstrate this agnostic approach to placebo construction through the use of GPT-2, a generative language model trained on a database of over 1 million internet news pages. Using GPT-2, we devise 5,000 distinct placebos and administer two experiments (N = 2,975). Our results illustrate how researchers can minimize their role in placebo selection through automated processes. We conclude by offering tools for incorporating computer-generated placebo text vignettes into survey experiments and developing recommendations for best practice.

Keywords

survey experimentsplacebos
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 481 - 494
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Sunshine Hillygus

*

Authors' names appear in alphabetical order.

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Supplementary material: Link

Porter and Velez Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4PYOXP
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Porter and Velez Supplementary Material

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