Audit experiments are used to measure discrimination in a large number of domains (Employment: Bertrand et al. (2004); Legislator responsiveness: Butler et al. (2011); Housing: Fang et al. (2018)). Audit studies all have in common that they estimate the average difference in response rates depending on randomly varied characteristics (such as the race or gender) of a requester. Scholars conducting audit experiments often seek to extend their analyses beyond the effect on response to the effects on the quality of the response. Response is a consequence of treatment; answering these important questions well is complicated by post-treatment bias (Montgomery et al., 2018). In this note, I consider a common form of post-treatment bias that occurs in audit experiments.

Attempts to correct political misperceptions often fail. The dominant theoretical explanation for this failure comes from psychological research on motivated reasoning. We identify a novel source of motivated reasoning in response to corrective information: the justification of socially undesirable preferences. Further, we demonstrate that this motivation can, under certain conditions, overpower the motivation to maintain congruence. Our empirical test is a national survey experiment that asks participants to reconcile partisan motivations and the motivation to justify voting against a racial minority candidate. Consistent with our argument, racially prejudiced participants dismiss corrections when misinformation is essential to justify voting against a black candidate of their own party, but accept corrections about an otherwise identical candidate of the opposing party. These results provide new insight into the persistence of certain forms of political misinformation.

A number of theoretical and empirical studies analyze the effect of inclement weather on voter turnout and in turn on parties’ vote share. However, empirical findings suggest that the effect of weather on parties’ vote share is greater than can be explained by its influence on voter turnout alone. This article provides experimental evidence of the effect of weather on vote choice between more- versus less-risky candidates. Findings show that bad weather significantly and sizeably depresses risk tolerance making voters less likely to vote for risky candidates. This article also provides evidence of a possible mechanism: unpleasant weather conditions depress agents’ mood, making agents less inclined to vote for candidates who are perceived as more risky.

Using a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the associations between employment status, self-reported political ideology, and preferences for redistribution. The experiment consists of a real-effort task, followed by a four-player dictator game. In one treatment, dictator game initial endowments depend on participants’ performance in the real-effort task, i.e., they are earned, in the other, they are randomly determined. We find that being employed or unemployed is associated with revealed redistributive preferences, while the political ideology of the employed and unemployed is not. In contrast, the revealed redistributive preferences of students are strongly associated with their political ideologies. The employed and right-leaning students redistribute earnings less than windfalls, the unemployed, and left-leaning students make no such distinction.

Shared social disadvantage relative to Whites is assumed to motivate inter-minority political behavior but we lack causal evidence. Using a survey experiment of 1,200 African Americans, we prompt respondents to consider group social position when evaluating political commonality with Latinos. The experiment describes racial disparities in a randomized domain (education or housing), varies the description of inequality (either Black versus White, Latino versus White, or Black and Latino versus White), and offers half of the respondents a political cue to test whether shared social disadvantage causes Blacks’ perceptions of political commonality with Latinos. We find little evidence of a causal relationship. We conclude that cross-racial minority political coalitions may be more difficult to activate than previously thought.

We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money. Conflicts occur spontaneously between any two individuals in the group. Players choose sides by ranking their loyalties to everyone else in the group, and they automatically support the disputant they ranked higher. We manipulate participants’ information about other players’ loyalties and also their ability to communicate with public chat messages. We find that participants spontaneously and quickly formed alliances, and more information about loyalties caused more alliance-building. Without communication, we observe little evidence of bandwagon or egalitarian strategies, but with communication, some groups invented rank rotation schemes to equalize payoffs while choosing the same side to avoid fighting costs.