The Psychology of Construal in the Design of Field Experiments∗ Elizabeth Levy Paluck & Eldar Shafir Department of Psychology & Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Princeton University March 20, 2016 ∗Revised version, prepared following the NBER Conference on Economics of Field Experiments, organized by Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee. Thank you to Robin Gomila, Sachin Banker, Peter Aronow, and Ruth Ditlmann for helpful comments. Address correspondence to
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[email protected]. 1 2 1 Introduction Why might you be interested in this chapter? A fair assumption is that you are reading because you care about good experimental design. To create strong experimental designs that test people’s responses to an intervention, researchers typically consider the classically recognized motivations presumed to drive human behavior. It does not take extensive psychological training to recognize that several types of motivations could affect an individual’s engagement with and honesty during your experimental paradigm. Such motivations include strategic self-presentation, suspicion, lack of trust, level of education or mastery, and simple utilitarian motives such as least effort and opti- mization. For example, minimizing the extent to which your findings are attributable to high levels of suspicion among participants, or to their decision to do the least amount possible, is important for increasing the generalizability and reliability of your results. Psychologists agree that these motivations are important to consider when designing experi- ments, but they rank other behavioral drivers higher. Some drivers of individual behavior often ignored by other experimental researchers, which psychologists consider critical, include: consis- tency, identity, emotional states like pride, depression, and hunger, social norms, and the perception of notions like justice and fairness.