Newsletters 2022

16/05 - Workshop by Florian Foos & colloquium by Florian Schaffner

Workshop

 

The DPIR Experimental Methods Course will have a weekly guest speaker presenting an experimental research design and findings.

Venue: Nuffield College, Large Lecture Room

 

 

Florian Foos

London School of Economics (LSE)

Tuesday, 17th May  －  17:00 – 18:00
“Making the Case for Democracy”
Political entrepreneurs put liberal democracy under pressure by fueling concerns and exploiting citizens’ fragile commitment to this system of government. As difficult trade-offs are made apparent in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we investigate one communicative strategy that political elites who want to defend the principles and practices…
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Colloquium

 

For this term, we are running the series both online and hybrid (in-person) depending on the presenter’s preferences. If you are interested in presenting your work, please contact Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk. To learn more about our upcoming presentations, please visit Upcoming Events section in our website.

 

 

Florian Schaffner

University of Oxford

Wednesday, 18th May  －  14:00 – 15:00
Conference Room, Nuffield College + Online
“The Emotional Roots of Affective Polarization in the United States”
Dislike and distrust of opposing partisans is a growing concern in most democracies.  However, we know little about the emotional roots of affective polarization. I present a pre-analysis plan for a survey experiment that studies the effects of shame, guilt, and pride on empathy towards the outgroup in the United States.
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09/05 - Workshop by Alberto Simpser & colloquium by Noah Bacine and David Rueda

Workshop

 

The DPIR Experimental Methods Course will have a weekly guest speaker presenting an experimental research design and findings.

Venue: Nuffield College, Large Lecture Room

 

 

Alberto Simpser

ITAM Mexico & TSE/IAST

Tuesday, 10th May  －  17:00 – 18:00
“Inter-Group Contact and Tolerant Behavior: An Experimental Study of Social Status”
Political polarization has become a defining feature of twenty-first century politics in many countries, but we know little about how to reduce it. We show that online contact under equal social status between people with opposing political sympathies enhances tolerant behaviors, including willingness to interact and to share material resources with…
More info

Colloquium

 

For this term, we are running the series both online and hybrid (in-person) depending on the presenter’s preferences. If you are interested in presenting your work, please contact Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk. To learn more about our upcoming presentations, please visit Upcoming Events section in our website.

 

 

Noah Bacine & David Rueda

University of Oxford

Wednesday, 11th May  －  14:00 – 15:00
Conference Room, Nuffield College + Online
“Fairness, Effort and Identity: Re-Examining the Determinants of Redistribution Preferences”
A large body of experimental literature has documented the relevance of endowment source in predicting behaviour in social interactions. Prior results and their theoretical underpinnings suggest that individuals prefer more equitable outcomes (more redistribution) when endowments are given rather than earned. However, to the best of our knowledge, all prior research on this topic has examined situations in which participant experience is symmetrical. Prior work has looked at cases in which all parties either earned or were given their income, or in which all parties have both earned and unearned income (even when they are individually exposed to the risk of losing some of the earned income). Instead, we propose to study preferences over redistribution in a situation in which some individuals earn their income through effort and time while others receive their income purely through luck using a method that is salient to both groups. We propose to use our novel design to better capture the role that “fairness” of the system plays in determining redistributive preferences (by studying a more realistic environment in which method of earnings vary across individuals instead of across environments).
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03/05 - Online colloquium by Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo

Online Colloquium

Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo

University of Oxford

Wednesday, 4th May @ 2:00 PM
“Why do People Simultaneously Condemn and Engage in Corruption? The Role of Contextualised Moral Intuitions”
The puzzle of how corruption can be simultaneously “widely condemned and yet widely practiced” (Hess & Dunfee, 2000:594) has been the starting point of many studies in political science. I argue that corruption being simultaneously condemn and widely practiced can be explained by the interaction of legal norms (institutional level), social norms (social level) and moral intuitions (individual level). I propose, following Haidt (2012) and Graham’s (Graham et al. 2011; Graham et al. 2013) Moral Foundation Theory, that there are some moral intuitions innate to every human being, but which intuitions manifest and how depends on the social and institutional context.  As part of my empirical approach I am proposing to run an online vignette experiment, in which respondents would be randomly presented with equivalent situations that vary on factors like closeness and risk of detection, to see whether stated propensity to engage in corruption changes and whether this is accompanied by changes in rationalisation.
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30/04 - Workshops by Ray Duch & Alberto Simpser

Workshops

 

The DPIR Experimental Methods Course will have a weekly guest speaker presenting an experimental research design and findings.

Venue: Nuffield College, Large Lecture Room

 

 

Raymond Duch

University of Oxford

Tuesday, 3rd May  －  17:00 – 18:00
“Ghana Financial Incentives Vaccine Study: Building an Evidence Base to Support the COVID-19 Vaccine Roll Out”
The Ghana Financial Incentives study is an RCT with 6500 participants designed primarily to determine whether cash incentives, which participants are informed about via a video message, increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, we also explore: the relative impact of cash incentives versus providing health information; how different levels of cash…
More info

 

 

Alberto Simpser

ITAM Mexico & TSE / IAST

Tuesday, 10th May  －  17:00 – 18:00
“Inter-Group Contact and Tolerant Behavior: An Experimental Study of Social Status”
Political polarization has become a defining feature of twenty-first century politics in many countries, but we know little about how to reduce it. We show that online contact under equal social status between people with opposing political sympathies enhances tolerant behaviors, including willingness to interact and to share material resources with…
More info

27/04 - Trinity 2022

The CESS team is excited for the return of Oxford students in time for the start of Trinity 2022. We are delighted to announce the return of in-person activities such as laboratory experiments and the opportunity to invite experimentalists from around the globe to visit CESS. We hope to see you at one or more of these upcoming opportunities to engage with us!

CESS Physical Laboratory Reopening

 

Over the past few weeks, we have successfully run a number of pilot sessions for a study being conducted by CESS’s assistant director, Noah Bacine.  We are pleased to share the overwhelmingly positive feedback and enthusiasm from our participants in response to the renewed opportunity to visit CESS to participate in laboratory sessions.  As a result, we are fully reopening our physical laboratory facilities to all researchers this Trinity term.   We are now running our physical sessions fully in tangent with our online and virtual laboratory opportunities.  If you would like additional information about any of our offerings or to discuss the possibility of running a study through CESS, please contact Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

 
As a result of the lab reopening and an uptick in CESS’s experimental activities, we are looking for additional research assistants to help us with facilitating our experiments.  If you are interested in assisting with our research and gaining exposure to the world of experiments, please read more about this opportunity in our website at https://cess-nuffield.nuff.ox.ac.uk/vacancies.

A new term means the return of CESS’s colloquia series. We already have a number of interesting speakers scheduled to present (see below). The colloquium series is dedicated to providing experimentalists with an opportunity to present their experimental designs and/or preliminary results for feedback from researchers from a wide array of disciplines.

Typically, the colloquia are held on Wednesdays from 14:00-15:00. Participation and attendance is open to all students and faculty. For this term, we are running the series both online and hybrid (in-person) depending on the presenter’s preferences. If you are interested in presenting your work, please contact Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk. To learn more about our upcoming presentations, please visit Upcoming Events section in our website or read on below:

Christoph Sponsel
University of Oxford

27th April 2022
Participation Yielding Stigmatization? Demobilized Rebels’ Involvement During Colombia’s Paro Nacional

 

Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo
University of Oxford

4th May 2022
Why do People Simultaneously Condemn and Engage in Corruption? The Role of Contextualised Moral Intuitions

 

Noah Bacine & David Rueda
University of Oxford

11th May 2022
Fairness, Effort and Identity: Re-Examining the Determinants of Redistribution Preferences

 

Florian Schaffner
University of Oxford

18th May 2022
The Emotional Roots of Affective Polarization in the United States

 

Seung Hoon Chae
University of Oxford

1st June 2022
Do Human Rights Trials Affect Anti-Immigration Perceptions?

 

Vicente Dinis Valentim
University of Oxford

8th June 2022
Authoritarian Repression and the Creation of Democratic Norms

CESS Visitors

With the return of CESS’s in-person activities, we are additionally enthused for the return of CESS’s visiting scholars. In the past, CESS has done its best to enrich Oxford life by inviting prominent and rising experimental researchers to share their current research and develop new projects with Oxford members. With this in mind, we are pleased to announce our upcoming visiting scholar:  Eugen Dimant.

Eugen is currently a Senior Research Fellow in Behavioral and Decision Science at the Identity and Conflict Lab, and the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania.

 

Eugen will join us to present his work and colloborate with Oxford members from August 1-20 (see below to learn more about the work he plans to present during his visit).

“Strategic Behavior with Tight, Loose, and Polarized Norms”

A large body of literature has shown that social norms can be a powerful driver of human actions, and norm interventions often focus on shifting beliefs about average or majoritarian behavior. This work addresses a less studied aspect of norms, namely the role that their strength, tightness, and degree of polarization play. In the context of strategic decisionmaking, we investigate both theoretically and empirically how behavior responds to different distributions of one’s peers’ behavior. We focus on the difference between tight (i.e., characterized by low behavioral variance), loose (i.e., characterized by high behavioral variance), and polarized (i.e., characterized by U-shaped behavior) norm environments. Our results show that in addition to the mean, the variance, and shape of the observed behavior matter. In particular, we find that variance in observed behavior begets variance in one’s own behavior. Tight, loose, and polarized norms are thus self-sustaining. In addition, we find that personal values matter more for behavior in loose and polarized norm environments.

If you would like to meet Eugen during his visit or would like to attend his talk, please contact Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

CESS Office Hours

In addition to our speaker series, we are pleased to announce the continuation of CESS office hours this term. Based on the positive feedback we received from last term’s participants, we have decided to continue offering office hours in Trinity term (and are considering adding more). CESS will continue offering office hours twice a week but at a new time, on Monday & Thursday from 11:00-12:00.

  • On Mondays, the office hour will be hosted by Tommaso Batistoni via Zoom (or in-person by request) and will primarily be an opportunity for researchers to ask questions about programming experiments. We ask interested researchers to contact CESS’s Postdoctoral researcher and lead programmer, Tommaso, at tommaso.batistoni@nuffield.ox.ac.uk to reserve a time slot and to provide a brief overview of their questions.
  • On Thursdays, the office hour will be hosted by Noah Bacine via Zoom (or in-person by request) and will primarily be an opportunity for researchers to ask questions about their experimental designs. We ask interested researchers to contact CESS’s assistant director, Noah, at noah.bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk to schedule a time slot and to provide a brief overview of their questions.

Applied Research Methods with Hidden, Marginal and Excluded Populations

 

15 – 19 August 2022 (one week course, full time / 35 hrs.)
Class times: 9:30 – 13:00 and 14:00 – 17:30

 

» Course Outline

Focusing on Hard-to-Reach populations, the course provides an introduction to research methods in conducting research, both qualitative and quantitative, on marginal, hidden and excluded population such as children, migrants, refugees and displaced people, sex workers, homeless, victims of conflicts or trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and drug users.

Aimed to promote action-oriented research, the course introduces the main theories and research approaches on exclusion and marginalization using different frameworks and techniques. It addresses the dangers associate with the lack of systematic use of solid research methodology, ethics, data collection and analysis in the formulation and evaluation of policies and program.

» Provisional Structure

This intensive course is structured using a combination of morning and afternoon sessions and is planned to run in its traditional face-to-face format this year.

The course brings together academics (PhD and masters students) and practitioners (from NGOs, UN and International Organizations), creating a unique opportunity for experience sharing and methodological cross-fertilization. Participants will be encouraged to present their past/ongoing/future work to be used and discussed during the course. Combining both taught and practical sessions, the main emphasis of the course is on acquiring practical skills in doing research.

 

More info

CESS oTree Course

Following an influx of demand following its successful implementation last year, CESS is organizing a second iteration of its oTree course designed by CESS’s Postdoctoral researcher and lead programmer, Tommaso Batistoni. In line with the feedback we received last summer, this year’s course will offer separate tracks for beginner and advanced beginner/intermediate oTree users. Keep your eyes on your inbox for an official announcement in a few weeks for the course we plan to run in June – July.

Experimental Methods Course

Raymond Duch, Director of CESS, will be leading his annual Experimental Methods course during trinity term. Although registration for the course is limited to DPIR students, the course invites a number of guest lecturers to give talks which are open to all Oxford members.  The first visiting lecturer is Alberto Simpser (University of Toulouse).  If you would like to attend their talk or receive information about this year’s additional guest speakers, please contact Melanie.Sawers@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

22/02 - Online colloquium by Peiran Jiao

Online Colloquium

Peiran Jiao

Maastricht University

Wednesday, 23rd February @ 2:00 PM
“Trained to Herd: Financial Knowledge and Portfolio Choices”
How do the insights from finance theories influence investment decisions? We plan to conduct a lab experiment in which we sort subjects according to their familiarity with the key intuitions of the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Then we ask them to participate in an asset allocation task in the lab. In this task, they allocate their experimental wealth between a risk-free asset and two risky assets, with known underlying price-generating processes. The tasks are designed in such a way that the MPT has sharp and intuitive predictions on allocation strategies. Between treatments, we manipulate volatilities and market trends, which should have no influence on the MPT-based strategy, to test their influences on portfolio weights. In this setting, we will investigate the behavioral differences between subjects who are familiar with MPT and those who are unfamiliar, in terms of their portfolio choices, disposition effect, correlation neglect, and extrapolation. Our results will reveal the influence of MPT and the reason for departures from MPT. This will shed light on a number of empirical findings, such as portfolio overlapping among individual investors (both retail and institutional), and the widening gap in abnormal returns between low alpha and high alpha portfolios subsequent to the proposition of CAPM. This will also enrich our understanding about financial literacy and financial education.
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15/02 - Online seminar by Verena Fetscher & David Rueda

Online Seminar

Verena Fetscher & David Rueda

University of Hamburg  |  University of Oxford

Wednesday, 16th February @ 2:00 PM
“More than Self-Interest? Income, Equality of Opportunity and Intergenerational Mobility”
Beliefs in equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility are increasingly popular as an explanation for redistribution preferences. Some individuals (even if they are poor) may be more willing to accept inequality as a result of a fair meritocratic process. Others (even when they are rich) may support redistribution if they believe inequality to be the result of an unfair system. In this project, we start with the relationship between material self-interest and redistribution preferences as a baseline. We then introduce the arguments about equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility that have been provided in the literature as important factors influencing the baseline effect of income. And we introduce a set of intuitions why the theorized effects of perceptions of equal opportunity or intergenerational mobility may be income-dependent (more relevant to the rich, less so to the poor). We test our hypotheses with data  from  3  different  surveys:   ISSP  2009,  EB  2017,  ESS 2018. In this Colloquium, we focus on the design of a survey experiment to complement our observational analysis.
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25/01 - Seminar by Amanda Lea & colloquium by Francesco Capozza

Seminar

Amanda Lea Robinson

Ohio State University

Tuesday, 25th January @ 12:30 PM
“Can Americans Depolarize? Assessing the Effects of Reciprocal Group Reflection on Partisan Polarization”
Overcoming America’s deep partisan polarization poses a unique challenge: Americans must be able to disagree on policy while nonetheless agreeing on more fundamental democratic principles. We study one model of depolarization—reciprocal group reflection—inspired by marital counseling and implemented by a non-governmental organization, Braver Angels….
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Colloquium

Francesco Capozza

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Wednesday, 26th January @ 2:00 PM
“Mental Health Literacy, Beliefs and Demand for Mental Health Support among University Students”
This paper assesses whether a mental health literacy intervention close the gap in the demand for mental health support among university students. Firstly, we develop a self-signalling model to derive testable implications about the students’ investments in mental health. Secondly, we test the model’s predictions in an incentivized survey experiment with…
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17/01 - Hilary 2022

Welcome back fellow researchers & experimentalists!

 

The CESS team is excited for the return of Oxford students in time for the start of Hilary 2022. We are looking forward to resuming in-person events and are optimistic that we will be able to running physical lab sessions this term! In the meantime, we have a number of announcements and events to mark in your calendar.

CESS Physical Laboratory Reopening

 

Although the virtual laboratory has proven to be a valuable alternative to the physical laboratory, we are looking forward to adding physical laboratory sessions back into our experimental offering. In preparation for reopening the lab, we successfully piloted a series of new Covid-conscious policies for the physical laboratory setting last term. Although our intention is to follow evolving conditions and university policy closely, we are optimistic that we will resume physical laboratory operations sometime this term. Once we have official confirmation of the lab reopening, we will make an announcement via our mailing list and social media. If you would like additional information about our timeline and/or to inquire about reserving a slot for one of your experiments, please contact noah.bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

We are excited for the return of the CESS Colloquia Series in Hilary 2022 and already have a number of interesting speakers scheduled to present (see below). The colloquium series is dedicated to providing experimentalists with an opportunity to present their experimental designs and/or preliminary results for feedback from researchers from a wide array of disciplines.

Typically, the colloquia are held on Wednesdays from 14:00-15:00. Participation and attendance is open to all students and faculty. For this term, we are running the series both online and hybrid (in-person) depending on the presenter’s preferences. If you are interested in presenting your work, please contact noah.bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk. To learn more about our upcoming presentations, please visit Upcoming Events section in our website or read on below:

Charles Lanfear
University of Oxford

19th January 2022
Disorder and Social Control: Experimental Evidence on Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior

 

Francesco Capozza
Erasmus University Rotterdam

26th January 2022
Mental Health Literacy, Beliefs and Demand for Mental Health Support among University Students

 

Haoyu Zhai
European University Institute

2nd February 2022
The End Justifies the Means: an Experimental Study of Goal Dependency in Small-Group Deliberation

 

CESS Co-organized Seminar Series

With the return of in-person events, we are also excited to announce the return of our co-organized seminar series. This term we have partnered with the Department of Politics and International Relations to invite two speakers to present their work.

The first presenter, Amanda Lea Robinson (Ohio State University), is scheduled to present on Tuesday, 25th January from 12:30-14:00. If you would like to receive the link for her talk or read more about her work, please click on Amanda’s picture.

Stay tuned for additional announcements about the second scheduled speaker, Jessica Gottlieb (Texas A&M University), who’s scheduled to present in the last week of Hilary term.

CESS Office Hours

 

In addition to our speaker series, we are pleased to announce the return of CESS office hours this term. Last term, we piloted this unique opportunity for researchers to receive one-on-one feedback on their experimental designs. Based on the positive feedback we received from last term’s participants, we have decided to continue offering office hours in Trinity term. CESS will continue offering office hours twice a week, on Monday & Thursday from 12:00-13:00.

  • On Mondays, the office hour will be hosted by Tommaso Batistoni via Zoom (or in-person by request) and will primarily be an opportunity for researchers to ask questions about programming experiments. We ask interested researchers to contact CESS’s Postdoctoral researcher and lead programmer, Tommaso, at tommaso.batistoni@nuffield.ox.ac.uk to reserve a time slot and to provide a brief overview of their questions.
  • On Thursdays, the office hour will be hosted by Noah Bacine via Zoom (or in-person by request) and will primarily be an opportunity for researchers to ask questions about their experimental designs.  We ask interested researchers to contact CESS’s assistant director, Noah, at noah.bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk to schedule a time slot and to provide a brief overview of their questions.

The Centre prides itself on its ability to facilitate experimental social science research for academics around the world. We have always done our best to come up with creative solutions to the unique problems posed by different experimental designs. We are pleased to highlight one such instance in which a group of researchers came to CESS with a unique set of problems that we were able to assist with solving:

 

Sara, Katharina & James approached CESS at the beginning of the summer to discuss the possibility of assisting with a project that was proving to be uniquely challenging to implement. The researchers were in need of individuals to participate in online discussions about current political issues but were facing issues with acquiring the sample they desired. After a short pre-discussion questionnaire to select partisans, participants would be invited to take part in a 30-minute discussion of a current political issue. Participants would be assigned to groups with either like-minded partisans (an ‘echo chamber’) or to a heterogeneous group in order to examine how group composition shape attitudes and deliberation. They would also be exposed to competing elite arguments about a policy issue that varied in terms of the emotiveness of the tone. This allows the researchers to examine whether emotive elite rhetoric shapes the nature of the discussion among participants as well as their attitudes. Following the policy discussion among the 7-8 people in the Zoom group and a trained facilitators, participants would answer a survey about their attitudes towards in- and out-group partisans.

CESS team members worked with the researchers to design and facilitate the rollout of a robust advertising campaign to attract the necessary partisans to sign-up for their study. Ultimately, we succeeded in recruiting over 600 partisan participants from across the country – drawing on the diverse subject pool at CESS as well as a targeted Facebook campaign to recruit political supporters broadly representative of the population in terms of gender, age and education – to take part in these online discussions. Beyond fulfilling the researchers’ needs, this process also created a positive externality in growing the CESS subject pool for future partners as well. While the advertising campaign was ongoing, CESS also assisted the researchers with conducting the study itself concurrently by rolling out the pre-discussion questionnaire to eligible signups as well as inviting those that completed the questionnaire to sign-up for available discussion times. To learn more about their project, continue reading below:

Affective Polarization in a Social Setting
A study by Sara Hobolt, Katharina Lawall and James Tilley

What drives affective polarization? Most of the research on affective polarization has used observational survey data to study the phenomenon. These studies have suggested that both elite polarization and interpersonal ‘echo chambers’ are drivers of polarization. In this project, researchers from the University of Oxford (Professor James Tilley) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (Professor Sara Hobolt and Ms Katharina Lawall) have conducted experiments with CESS to explore the drivers of affective polarization in a social setting. More specifically, they designed an experimental social setting – an online group discussion – to examine how affective elite polarization and group composition shape affective polarization among partisans in Britain.

With the help of the expertise and support of CESS – and the financial support of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – this innovative experimental design has enabled the researchers to examine how group composition and elite cues impact affective polarization of partisans.