Interacting as equals reduces partisan polarization in Mexico.

In many contemporary democracies, political polarization increasingly involves deep-seated intolerance of opposing partisans. The decades-old contact hypothesis suggests that cross-partisan interactions might reduce intolerance if individuals interact with equal social status. Here we test this idea by implementing collaborative contact between 1,227 pairs of citizens (2,454 individuals) with opposing partisan sympathies in Mexico, using the online medium to credibly randomize participants' relative social status within the interaction.

Do you have COVID-19? How to increase the use of diagnostic and contact tracing apps.

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are a needed weapon to contain contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influence adoption by running a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three different prompts, or a control condition, before stating their willingness to adopt a diagnostic app and contact tracing app.

Let's (not) get together! The role of social norms on social distancing during COVID-19.

While effective preventive measures against COVID-19 are now widely known, many individuals fail to adopt them. This article provides experimental evidence about one potentially important driver of compliance with social distancing: social norms. We asked each of 23,000 survey respondents in Mexico to predict how a fictional person would behave when faced with the choice about whether or not to attend a friend's birthday gathering.