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 April 1, 2015 ∗Preliminary version, prepared for 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 have you picked up this book? 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 some intervention, most researchers consider classically recognized behavioral motivations. It does not take an advanced degree in psychology to understand 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, level of education or mastery, trust, and principles of utilitarian motives, least effort, and optimization. For example, minimizing the extent to which your results depend on high levels of participant suspicion, or decisions to do 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, drivers of individual behavior often ignored by other experimental researchers: consistency, identity, emotional states like pride, depression, and hunger, social norms, and perceptions of ideas like justice and fairness. Moreover, psychologists are keenly aware of features of the immediate situation that promote or diminish these behavioral drivers.