Research & Projects
Research & Projects
Joint work with Ro'ee Levy and Moses Shayo
Coverage of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war varies enormously across the two sides of the conflict. The two sides also seem to hold sharply different beliefs about the facts of the conflict, with each doubting the other’s claims regarding civilian casualties. Are these purely a product of ignorance and biased local news outlets, or is there also a supply side element to the phenomena? How would their perceptions and behaviors change if they were exposed to sort of news they usually do not see?
We conduct a large scale experiment among Israeli Jews and Jordanian Arabs to ask three questions relating to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. First, do individuals try to avoid information about victims from the other side? If so, why? Second, if individuals were exposed to such information, would this affect their empathy towards the other side, and their views on the conduct of the war? Third, is the effect different for people who seek to avoid news about outgroup victims?
Joint work with Robin Musolff
Differences in factual beliefs between members of opposing political parties are sometimes attributed to politically motivated reasoning - an asymmetric reaction to information whereby friendly political messages are weighed more heavily. Using two different estimation tasks, we find that most American partisans do not exhibit this behavior, though they do expect others to exhibit it. This coincides with an exaggerated perception of the partisan gap. Our experimental design stands out in that it includes accuracy incentives, easy-to-interpret signals, and a measure of belief movement. Our results suggest politically motivated reasoning is not widespread and is unlikely to explain partisan gaps in factual belief.
Grant, Kajii and Polak (2000) show that certain families of non-standard utility revert to expected utility when combined with intrinsic preferences for information. I show this reversion can be circumnavigated by forgoing “Compound Independence”, a common but surprisingly limiting assumption.