Persuading People on More and Less Divisive Issues

这个项目考察了人们对现实世界事件的真实信念如何影响他们对公共信息的反应，以及说服人们改变他们的信念有多难。这个问题很重要，因为政府和专家经常试图说服公民根据他们收集的信息采取某些行动。这种情况在很多情况下都会发生，从个人决定采取健康预防措施，到企业主决定在经济长期放缓的情况下维持自己的企业。如果不遵循政府提出的这些建议，可能会出现严重的效率低下和协调失败。向公众发布信息的最佳方式是什么？在实践中，是什么证据阻止说服像理论上那样起作用？研究真正的信念如何对知识来源提供的信息作出反应是一项复杂的任务，因为这些信念通常是未知的，对不同的人来说可能是不同的，特别是在分歧的话题上。这项研究开发了一种传递信息的新机制，可以在不知道参与者最初的信念的情况下进行说服测试，从而使我们能够区分信息政策的不同可能障碍。利用这一机制，我们测试了信息政策在各个领域的有效性，包括政治和经济问题、可持续性问题和一般知识问题。具体来说，我们的新机制通过诱导共同的后验信念来规避未知和异质的先验信念。我们表明，从信息设计者的角度来看，这种新机制是最优的，即与信息设计者知道每个接收者的先验的机制获得相同的预期收益。为了测试这一机制，我们进行了两组实验：一组在实验室进行诱导先验，另一组在现场进行真实先验。在第二组实验中，我们首先引出人们在不同领域的固有先验，然后检查它们在回应公开提供的信息结构时的演变。此外，我们探讨了通过受访者之间的廉价谈话传播信息，代表了人口中的八卦；我们还研究了这种传播如何受到受访者偏好异质性的影响，以及他们对偏好在人群中分布的看法，即同质程度。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines how people’s genuine beliefs about real world events inform their responses to public information, and how hard it is to persuade people to change their beliefs. This question is important as governments and experts often try to persuade citizens to take certain actions based on the information they collect. This happens in many settings ranging from an individual’s decision to adopt health precautions to a business owner’s decision to keep his/her business afloat in times of prolonged economic slowdown. Major inefficiencies and coordination failures could ensue if these recommendations made by the government are not followed. What is the best way to release information to the general public? What affordances prevent persuasion in practice from working as it does in theory? Studying how genuine beliefs respond to information provided by a knowledgeable source is a complex task since such beliefs are in general unknown and are likely to be different for different people, especially on divisive topics. This research develops a new mechanism of delivering information that allows testing for persuasion without needing to know participants’ initial believes, and hence allows us to separate different possible impediments to information policies. Using this mechanism, we test the efficacy of information policies across various domains including political and economic issues, sustainability concerns, and general knowledge questions. Specifically, our new mechanism circumvents unknown and heterogeneous prior beliefs by inducing a common posterior belief. We show that this new mechanism is optimal from the perspective of the information designer, i.e., attains the same expected payoff as the one in which the information designer knows each receiver’s prior. To test this mechanism, we conduct two sets of experiments: one in the laboratory with induced priors, and another in the field with genuine priors. In the second set of experiments, we first elicit homegrown priors people hold in a variety of domains and then examine their evolution in response to publicly provided information structures. In addition, we explore the propagation of information via cheap-talk communication between respondents, representing gossip in a population; and we study how this propagation is impacted by heterogeneity in respondents’ preferences and their beliefs about the distribution of preferences in the population, i.e., the degree of homophily.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.