Despite the introduction of social restrictions designed to stem the spread of COVID-19, many Indonesians have continued to attend places of worship. This poses a major public health threat, as congregational prayer involves large numbers of worshippers gathering under conditions known to enable the spread of the virus. Using a nationally representative survey, we evaluated the efficacy of messages delivered from different authorities in encouraging Indonesians to worship at home. We find no consistent evidence that public health messages change Indonesians’ attitudes toward communal prayer or their willingness to forgo communal prayer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, however, looking at well-defined subpopulations – non-Muslims and supporters of the president – we find suggestive evidence that messages were effective in increasing the likelihood of individuals to indicate a willingness to forgo communal prayer in the forthcoming week. Our results suggest that public health officials should eschew blanket messaging strategies in favor of more targeted approaches.

Affective polarization – partisans’ dislike and distrust of those from the other party – has reached historically high levels in the United States. While numerous studies estimate its effect on apolitical outcomes (e.g., dating and economic transactions), we know much less about its effects on political beliefs. We argue that those who exhibit high levels of affective polarization politicize ostensibly apolitical issues and actors. An experiment focused on responses to COVID-19 that relies on pre-pandemic, exogenous measures of affective polarization supports our expectations. Partisans who harbor high levels of animus towards the other party do not differentiate the “United States’” response to COVID-19 from that of the Trump administration. Less affectively polarized partisans, in contrast, do not politicize evaluations of the country’s response. Our results provide evidence of how affective polarization, apart from partisanship itself, shapes substantive beliefs. Affective polarization has political consequences and political beliefs stem, in part, from partisan animus.

Many western liberal democracies have witnessed increased discrimination against immigrants and opposition to multiculturalism. Prior research identifies ethno-linguistic differences between immigrant and native populations as the key source of such bias. Linguistic assimilation has therefore been proposed as an important mechanism to reduce discrimination and mitigate conflict between natives and immigrants. Using large-scale field experiments conducted in 30 cities across Germany – a country with a high influx of immigrants and refugees – we empirically test whether linguistic assimilation reduces discrimination against Muslim immigrants in everyday social interactions. We find that it does not; Muslim immigrants are no less likely to be discriminated against even if they appear to be linguistically assimilated. However, we also find that ethno-linguistic differences alone do not cause bias among natives in a country with a large immigrant population and state policies that encourage multiculturalism.

Our research speaks to the ongoing debate over the extent and severity of partisan political divisions in American society. We employ behavioral experiments to probe for affective polarization using dictator, trust, and public goods games with party identification treatments. We find that subjects who identify politically with the Democratic or Republican Party and ideologically as liberals and conservatives display stronger affective biases than politically unaffiliated and ideological moderates. Partisan subjects are less altruistic, less trusting, and less likely to contribute to a mutually beneficial public good when paired with members of the opposing party. Compared to other behavioral studies, our research suggests increasing levels of affective polarization in the way Americans relate to one another politically, bordering on the entrenched divisions one commonly sees in conflict or post-conflict societies. To overcome affective polarization, our research points to inter-group contact as a mechanism for increasing trust and bridging political divides.

How much does politics affect relationship building? Previous experimental studies have come to vastly different conclusions – ranging from null to truly transformative effects. To explore these differences, this study replicates and extends previous research by conducting five survey experiments meant to expand our understanding of how politics does/does not shape the formation of romantic relationships. We find that people, indeed, are influenced by the politics of prospective partners; respondents evaluate those in the political out-group as being less attractive, less dateable, and less worthy of matchmaking efforts. However, these effects are modest in size – falling almost exactly in between previous study estimates. Our results shine light on a literature that has, up until this point, produced a chasm in study results – a vital task given concerns over growing levels of partisan animus in the USA and the rapidly expanding body of research on affective polarization.

Are elected officials more responsive to men than women inquiring about access to government services? Women face discrimination in many realms of politics, but evidence is limited on whether such discrimination extends to interactions between women and elected officials. In recent years, several field experiments have examined public officials’ responsiveness. The majority focused on racial bias in the USA, while the few experiments outside the USA were usually single-country studies. We explore gender bias with the first large-scale audit experiment in five countries in Europe (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Netherlands) and six in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay). A citizen alias whose gender is randomized contacts members of parliament about unemployment benefits or healthcare services. The results are surprising. Legislators respond significantly more to women (+3% points), especially in Europe (+4.3% points). In Europe, female legislators in particular reply substantially more to women (+8.4% points).

China’s rise is ushering in a new era of geostrategic contestation involving foreign aid. In many traditional OECD donors, aid policy is changing as a result. We report on a survey experiment studying the impacts of rising Chinese aid on public opinion in traditional donors. We randomly treated people with vignettes emphasising China’s rise as an aid donor in the Pacific, a region of substantial geostrategic competition. We used a large, nationally-representative sample of Australians (Australia is the largest donor to the Pacific). As expected, treating participants reduced hostility to aid and increased support for more aid focused on the Pacific. Counter to expectations, however, treatment reduced support for using aid to advance Australian interests. These findings were largely replicated in a separate experiment in New Zealand. Knowledge of Chinese competition changes support for aid, but it does not increase support for using aid as a tool of geostrategy.

The dynamics of choice and self-selection are central features of politics but absent from most experimental designs. We show how designs that incorporate choice, by allowing some subjects the option to receive or avoid treatment, can be extended by randomizing conditional on subjects’ treatment choices to answer further questions of interest while preserving statistical power. We apply this design to study how the gender of messengers for the #MeToo social movement conditions who receives the movement’s message and how they respond. Our results, from both convenience and nationally representative samples, suggest that #MeToo movement’s message reaches a wide audience with the intended effect. The potential for backlash in response to the message appears limited but more likely when this message is delivered by a woman.

The extent to which citizens comply with newly enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different ‘face-saving’ questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to +11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question.