Peer-to-peer communication in East and West Africa may help promote COVID-19 policy compliance

Containing the COVID-19 pandemic requires the public’s cooperation in adopting health behaviours such as mask wearing and physical distancing. An online survey conducted in April 2020 shows that respondents in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda had accurate information about COVID-19 but underestimated their peers’ support for COVID-related health policies. However, a majority of respondents were willing to encourage others to practice physical distancing, suggesting that peer-to-peer communication could be used to increase compliance with public health policies

Battling the Coronavirus Infodemic Among Social Media Users in Africa

How can we induce social media users to be discerning when sharing information during a pandemic? An experiment on Facebook Messenger with users from Kenya and Nigeria tested interventions designed to decrease intentions to share COVID-19 misinformation without decreasing intentions to share factual posts. The initial stage of the study incorporated: (i) a factorial design with 40 intervention combinations; and (ii) a contextual adaptive design, increasing the probability of assignment to treatments that worked better for previous subjects with similar characteristics. The second stage evaluated the best-performing treatments and a targeted treatment assignment policy estimated from the data. We precisely estimate null effects from warning flags and related article suggestions, tactics used by social media platforms. However, tips to identify misinformation and nudges to consider information's accuracy reduced misinformation sharing by 4.2% and 4.9% respectively. Such low-cost scalable interventions may improve the quality of information circulating online.Comment: 54 pages including appendix, 10 figure

Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not help

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed -- but largely untested -- claim that people are worse at identifying true versus false headlines when the headlines are emotionally provocative. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. A second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines

Why the poor vote in a dominant-party system

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-176).In dominant-party states, why do individuals vote in elections with foregone conclusions when they are neither bought nor coerced? It is especially curious in these cases why the rural poor decide to cast their ballots. I posit that communities that collectively rely on the government for public services foster social norms of voting to influence turnout. Motivated by the perception that regimes reward high turnout areas with public goods, communities use esteem "carrots" and social "sticks" to overcome free-rider incentives and increase the likelihood of receiving services. The norm is strongest in less politically-competitive areas, precisely where the puzzle of participation is most obvious. At the individual level, those who rely on their local community for non-material goods, such as information and kinship, are more likely to comply with the norm in order to secure their access to these social benefits. Findings from a lab-in-the-field voting experiment in rural Tanzania indicate a strong influence of the social norm of voting. In the experiment, when turnout is public to their neighbors, respondents are 11 percentage points more likely to vote, compared to when they are in private. The theory, which applies broadly to many patronage-based regimes, explains how communities sustain social norms of voting even when elections lack legitimacy, elucidating the paradox of high turnout in dominant-party systems.by Leah R. Rosenzweig.Ph. D

Replication Data for "Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives' Attitudes Toward Immigrants"

This archive contains replication code for the analyses reported in "Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives' Attitudes Toward Immigrants." It includes the data, codebooks, and code to replicate the figures and tables in the paper (attribute_affinity_replication.R), as well as separate code to replicate the appendix (attribute_affinity_replication_APPENDIX.R)

State of the Fiscal Contract in Lagos’ Informal Settlements

Abstract Governments often have contentious relationships with residents of urban informal settlements. Motivated by the desire for rents and dreams of becoming the next luxury destination, city governments worldwide have forcefully evicted and demolished informal communities in this pursuit. In such instances it would seem that the state has broken the social contract with its most vulnerable citizens. How do citizens respond? We might expect them to reciprocate in kind, by withholding taxes owed to the government. Using a survey of citizens living in informal settlements across Lagos State in Nigeria, we explore what predicts citizens’ willingness to comply with government taxation. In this unlikely context for voluntary compliance, we observe that a third of respondents pay taxes and a majority are willing to pay absent enforcement. We find minimal support for standard theories of tax payment — trust in or reciprocity toward the government, or identification with the nation. Instead, we find that willingness to pay taxes is correlated with group membership, believing that community members respect taxpayers, and donating to the community. Our data suggest that local institutions and social relations are associated with citizens’ willingness to comply with tax policy