Air pollution and anti-social behaviour: Evidence from a randomised lab-in-the-field experiment.
Air pollution and anti-social behaviour: Evidence from a randomised lab-in-the-field experiment.
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DOI：
10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115617
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发表时间：
2022-12
影响因子：
5.4
通讯作者：
P. Lohmann;E. Gsottbauer;Jing You;A. Kontoleon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
P. Lohmann;E. Gsottbauer;Jing You;A. Kontoleon
我们在中国北京进行了一项预先注册的随机现场实验室在线实验，以探索急性空气污染与反社会行为之间的关系。我们新颖的实验设计利用污染事件中自然发生的不连续性来模拟污染暴露被外源操纵的实验环境，从而使我们能够确定因果关系。参与者被随机分配到高污染或低污染的日子接受调查，从而改变污染暴露的程度。此外，在高污染日接受调查的一部分人收到了额外的“污染警报”，以探索提供空气污染警报是否会影响（保护）行为。我们使用了一套完善的激励经济游戏来获得反社会行为的清洁措施，以及一系列可能推动拟议的污染行为关系的次要结果。我们的研究结果表明，暴露于急性空气污染对反社会行为没有统计学显著影响，但显着降低了心理和生理健康。然而，在调整多个假设检验后，这些影响在统计学上并不显著。我们没有发现任何证据表明污染影响认知能力，目前的偏见，折扣，或风险规避，四个潜在的途径，可以解释污染和反社会行为之间的关系。我们的研究增加了对有目的地设计和预先登记的实验的日益增长的呼吁，这些实验加强了实验（而不是相关或准实验）识别，从而允许对污染和反社会行为之间的关系进行因果洞察。
We conducted a pre-registered randomised lab-in-the-field online experiment in Beijing, China, to explore the relationship between acute air pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our novel experimental design exploits naturally occurring discontinuities in pollution episodes to mimic an experimental setting in which pollution exposure is exogenously manipulated, thus allowing us to identify a causal relationship. Participants were randomly assigned to be surveyed on either high pollution or low pollution days, thereby exogenously varying the degree of pollution exposure. In addition, a subset of individuals surveyed on the high-pollution days received an additional ‘pollution alert’ to explore whether providing air pollution warnings influences (protective) behaviour. We used a set of well-established incentivised economic games to obtain clean measures of anti-social behaviour, as well as a range of secondary outcomes which may drive the proposed pollution-behaviour relationship. Our results indicate that exposure to acute air pollution had no statistically significant effect on anti-social behaviour, but significantly reduced both psychological and physiological well-being. However, these effects do not remain statistically significant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. We find no evidence that pollution affects cognitive ability, present bias, discounting, or risk aversion, four potential pathways which may explain the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our study adds to the growing calls for purposefully designed and pre-registered experiments that strengthen experimental (as opposed to correlational or quasi-experimental) identification and thus allow causal insights into the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour.