Jeffrey P. Carpenter

This study experimentally tests the impact of providing information about vaccine safety and efficacy delivered by Black health care professionals. We find that providing general information increases vaccination rates after 5 months by 8 percentage points (17%), driven by a 9.8 pp (24%) increase among white participants. Political affiliation emerges as a key moderator to explain this discordant effect. Across race, general information is more effective for politically moderate and conservative respondents, most of whom are white. Among this most vaccine‐hesitant group, the information effectively addresses concerns about both side effects and unknown long‐run effects due to the fast approval of the vaccine, increasing vaccination rates by 14 pp.

Measuring the social preferences of economic agents using experiments has become common place. This process, while incentive compatible, is costly and time consuming, making it infeasible in many settings. We combine standard altruism and warm glow choice experiments with a battery of candidate survey questions to construct behaviorally validated questionnaires. We use machine learning to create parsimonious 3-question modules that reliably replicate existing results on general altruism and provide an alternative method for collecting warm glow preferences.

The influence of misinformation on the political decision-making process became a major concern in the United States after the 2016 Presidential election. We study the impact of “fake news” in the 2020 election cycle by conducting an online experiment the day before the “Super Tuesday” primary elections. Respondents attempt to differentiate between fake and true news headlines that vary exogenously with respect to the emotive language in which they are written. In addition to confirming the effect of demographics and identifying a new determinant of beliefs, the illusion of personal objectivity, we find that the sentiment of a headline determines whether it is believed and correctly assessed. We also find that the effects of emotive language vary by political affiliation. These results suggest ways to protect oneself against misinformation and engage critically with the news.

Media coverage of Muslims has been repeatedly shown to be negative, and attitudes toward Muslims in American society are typically more negative than attitudes toward other social groups. Does the tone of media coverage directly affect public attitudes? This relationship is not well established with respect to Muslims, nor as a proposition about social groups in general. We use an online between-subjects experiment to examine whether exposure to articles of quantifiably different valences about Muslims or Catholics affects reported attitudes toward each of those groups. We find clear support for this proposition. Our additional tests demonstrate that this effect persists but is attenuated when money is at stake. We also identify anxiety as a key mediator between exposure to articles of different valences and attitudes about each group. Our findings suggest that articles of a particular tone can influence views of social groups.

We extend the literature structurally estimating social preferences by accounting for the desire to adhere to social norms. Our representative agent is strongly motivated by norms and failing to account for this causes us to overestimate how much agents care about helping those who are worse off. We endogenously identify latent preference types that replicate previous estimates; however, accounting for the normative appropriateness of decisions reveals different motives. Rather than being mostly altruistic, participants are better described as strong altruists or norm followers. Our results (which are robust to moral wiggle room) thus recast prior findings in a new light.

Auctions and raffles are commonly used to fund public goods. We run fundraising events in the field at the meetings of a well‐known service organization across the United States to examine the fundraising properties of five mechanisms: one that is common in the literature, two that are familiar to practitioners in the field, and two that are new. Consistent with a novel model assuming independent private attachments to the charity, we find large differences in the performance between the two most familiar formats, but these disparities are dwarfed by the differentials achieved using the new and less common formats.