F.0.1 Prospective Expectations: Results on Individual Survey Items

Figure 5.3 presents results of experimental analyses in which the dependent variable is a mean index capturing participants’ prospective expectations of the candidates presented in the field experiment. This section presents the results on each of the individual items that make up the index.

F.0.2 Norms of Reciprocity Tests

This section presents the measures and results used to address the social norms of reciprocity alternative explanation. I first describe the measures and then present the results.

I measure positive reciprocity, which captures the degree to which someone is willing to incur costs to pay back those who have helped them, and negative reciprocity, which captures the degree to which someone is willing to incur costs to seek revenge against someone who has wronged them. To capture positive reciprocity, I measure the degree of agreement (on a 5-point scale) with the statements: (1) “If someone does me a favor, I am prepared to return it,” and (2) “I will go out of my way to help somebody who has been kind to me before.” To measure negative reciprocity, I assess participants’ degree of agreement with the following statements: (1) “If somebody insults me, I will insult him or her back,” and (2) “If somebody puts me in a difficult position I will do the same to him or her.” I average the two responses in each category to get measures of positive and negative reciprocity, and average those two scores to produce a measure of average reciprocity. I present results using all three measures— average, positive, and negative—in part because positive and negative reciprocity are weakly correlated (r = −0.1) and because they may capture different traits (Dohmen et al., 2009). These measures are admittedly less precise than behavioral measures, such as those used in Finan and Schechter (2012). This is in part because they are prone to response bias and in part because the questions are open to interpretation and therefore provide a less uniform decision-making environment. However, they are widely used survey-based measures of positive and negative reciprocity.

The results are presented below. Columns 1, 3, and 5 present the interaction between treatment and each of the individual reciprocity measures in models without control variables.