Narratives and opinion polarization: a survey experiment.

We explore the impact of narratives on beliefs and policy opinions through a survey experiment that exposes US subjects to two media-based explanations of the causes of COVID-19. The Lab Narrative ascribes the pandemic to human error and scientific misconduct in a Chinese lab, and the Nature Narrative describes the natural causes of the virus. First, we find that both narratives influence individual beliefs about COVID-19 origins.

The influence of personality traits on university performance: Evidence from Italian freshmen students.

Despite several attempts to provide a definite pattern regarding the effects of personality traits on performance in higher education, the debate over the nature of the relationship is far from being conclusive. The use of different subject pools and sample sizes, as well as the use of identification strategies that either do not adequately account for selection bias or are unable to establish causality between measures of academic performance and noncognitive skills, are possible sources of heterogeneity. This paper investigates the impact of the Big Five traits, as measured before the beginning of the academic year, on the grade point average achieved in the first year after the enrolment, taking advantage of a unique and large dataset from a cohort of Italian students in all undergraduate programs containing detailed information on student and parental characteristics.

Does Whistleblowing on Tax Evaders Reduce Ingroup Cooperation?

Whistleblowing is a powerful and rather inexpensive instrument to deter tax evasion. Despite the deterrent effects on tax evasion, whistleblowing can reduce trust and undermine agents' attitude to cooperate with group members. Yet, no study has investigated the potential spillover effects of whistleblowing on ingroup cooperation.

Trust in the Health System and COVID-19 Treatment.

COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mostly unprepared to combat the virus because of limited resources. The problems in LMICs are exacerbated by the fact that citizens in these countries generally exhibit low trust in the healthcare system because of its low quality, which could trigger a number of uncooperative behaviors.

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap.

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.

Cervical cancer screening invitations in low and middle income countries: Evidence from Armenia.

Roughly 90 percent of cervical cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where the lack of adequate infrastructures hampers screening, while informational, cultural, and socio-economic barriers limit participation in the few programs that do exist. We conducted a field experiment with the Armenian cervical cancer screening program to determine whether, despite these barriers, the simple, economical invitation strategies adopted in high-income countries could enhance screening take-up in LMICs. We find that letters of invitation increase screening take-up, especially when there are follow-up reminders.

A survey experiment on information, taxpayer preferences, and perceived adequacy of the tax burden.

We report results of a survey experiment aimed at testing whether eliciting taxpayer preferences on how to allocate the collected taxes over national public goods as well as providing information about the composition of the public expenditure influence the tax rate that taxpayers consider adequate to pay. We find that information exerts no effects on the level of the adequate tax rate. However, taxpayers are willing to accept a higher tax burden when they express their preferences on how to use tax revenues to finance public goods and services.

Asymmetric affective forecasting errors and their correlation with subjective well-being.

Aims: Social scientists have postulated that the discrepancy between achievements and expectations affects individuals' subjective well-being. Still, little has been done to qualify and quantify such a psychological effect. Our empirical analysis assesses the consequences of positive and negative affective forecasting errors-the difference between realized and expected subjective well-being-on the subsequent level of subjective well-being.

Economic behavior under the influence of alcohol: an experiment on time preferences, risk-taking, and altruism.

We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment undertaken with the purpose of providing controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk-taking, time preferences and altruism. Our design disentangles the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expectations, as we compare the behavior of three groups of subjects: those who participated in an experiment with no reference to alcohol, those who were exposed to the possibility of consuming alcohol but were given a placebo and those who effectively consumed alcohol. All subjects participated in a series of economic tasks administered in the same sequence across treatments.

Age, Health and Life Satisfaction Among Older Europeans.

In this paper we investigate how age affects the self-reported level of life satisfaction among the elderly in Europe. By using a vignette approach, we find evidence that age influences life satisfaction through two counterbalancing channels. On the one hand, controlling for the effects of all other variables, the own perceived level of life satisfaction increases with age.

A systematic review of adverse events in placebo groups of anti-migraine clinical trials.

In analgesic clinical trials, adverse events are reported for the painkiller under evaluation and compared with adverse events in the placebo group. Interestingly, patients who receive the placebo often report a high frequency of adverse events, but little is understood about the nature of these negative effects. In the present study, we compared the rates of adverse events reported in the placebo arms of clinical trials for three classes of anti-migraine drugs: NSAIDs, triptans and anticonvulsants.

Collicular vision guides nonconscious behavior.

Following destruction or deafferentation of primary visual cortex (area V1, striate cortex), clinical blindness ensues, but residual visual functions may, nevertheless, persist without perceptual consciousness (a condition termed blindsight). The study of patients with such lesions thus offers a unique opportunity to investigate what visual capacities are mediated by the extrastriate pathways that bypass V1. Here we provide evidence for a crucial role of the collicular-extrastriate pathway in nonconscious visuomotor integration by showing that, in the absence of V1, the superior colliculus (SC) is essential to translate visual signals that cannot be consciously perceived into motor outputs.

Differentiated forgetting rates of spatial knowledge in humans in the absence of repeated testing.

Spatial knowledge, necessary for efficient navigation, comprises route knowledge (memory of the landmarks along a route) and survey knowledge (map-like). Available data on the retention in humans of spatial knowledge show that this does not decline systematically over months or years. Here, two groups of participants elaborated route and survey knowledge during navigation in a complex virtual environment before performing route and survey tasks.

Mental number line disruption in a right-neglect patient after a left-hemisphere stroke.

A right-neglect patient with focal left-hemisphere damage to the posterior superior parietal lobe was assessed for numerical knowledge and tested on the bisection of numerical intervals and visual lines. The semantic and verbal knowledge of numbers was preserved, whereas the performance in numerical tasks that strongly emphasize the visuo-spatial layout of numbers (e.g.

Acceleration perception and spatial distortion in a left unilateral neglect patient.

To explain relative leftward overextension in a line extension task by left unilateral neglect subjects, Bisiach et al. (1998) suggested that the representation of space is distorted--i.e.