Human Subjects for Experiments

Researchers on campus interested in doing experimental research have a number of options for recruiting participants. These options are described below.

TESS – Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences

Listed below is more detail on the projects of each of the Stanford Tess Researchers:

1) Jeremy Bailenson (Communication)

Project: "Non-Verbal Cues in Politics: Assessing the Interaction between Facial Similarity, Gender, and Candidate Visibility"

Abstract:
Similarity is a powerful interpersonal cue.  This research extends the similarity-preference effect to the domain of politics. Given the pervasiveness of digital technology in modern media, it is increasingly possible for candidates to utilize visual rather than text-based "similarity displays" when campaigning for office.  In two previous studies researchers have demonstrated that voters do in fact respond more favorably to a candidate who resembles them.  This proposal seeks support for a new study in which addresses two important shortcoming of previous work:  the absence of female candidates and the lack of variation in the visibility of the stimulus candidate.  Thus, in the current study we use both male and female candidates who are either familiar or unfamiliar to the public.  By including candidate gender and visibility as experimental conditions, we can determine 1) the generalizability of the similarity effect across candidate gender, 2) the interaction between candidate visibility and nonverbal influence, and 3) further exploration of the 'gender backlash effect.'

http://www.stanford.edu/group/vhil/identity_capture.html

2) John Bullock (Political Science)

Project: "Understanding "Don't Know" Responses to Knowledge Items."

Abstract:
Against long tradition, there has been some recent argument for discouraging "don't know" responses (encouraging substantive responses) to political knowledge questions, and the ANES has subsequently adopted this practice. The upshot, and perhaps the motivation, is a somewhat less unflattering portrait of political information levels. In this project we examine the merits of discouraging DKs, versus encouraging, versus doing neither. We focus on the consequences for description, while also considering those for correlation (validity in the usual sense).
 
http://bullock.stanford.edu/DKs.pdf. 

3) Philip Garland (Communication)

4) Shanto Iyengar (Communication)

5) Jon Krosnick (Communication, Political Science, and Psychology)

Project: "Social Desirability and Voter Turnout Reports."

Dataset: Vote Over-Reporting: A Test of the Social Desirability Hypothesis

Abstract:
Our experimental study tests the widely-presumed notion that the tendency to present oneself in an admirable light (social desirability biases) lead respondents to over-report turnout in surveys. In other words, it is presumed that surveys consistently over-estimate voter turnout because respondents feel that voting is socially desirable and falsely report voting when they did not. Most previous attempts to reduce social desirability response bias have not reduced over-reporting. Here, we test two methods shown to reduce social desirability response bias in other domains, the list method and randomized response, in an experiment on vote over-reporting. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: direct reports of turnout, the list method, and randomized response. Our inferences about the alternate methods' power to reduce over-reporting come from comparisons of the three experimental groups.
http://www.experimentcentral.org/data/data.php?pid=120

6) Neil Malhotra (Political Science) & Alexander Kuo (Political Science)

Project: "Sources of Blame Attribution: Citizen Attitudes Towards Public Officials after 9/11"

Abstract:
When government fails, whom do citizens blame?  Despite the vast literatures on retrospective voting and attribution, there exists little theory and evidence on how citizens apportion blame among multiple public officials in the wake of government failure.  We address this omission by proposing a simple survey experiment exploring citizen attitudes regarding blame of intelligence officials for making America vulnerable to the attacks on 9/11.  We manipulate the party labels attached to various government officials and then asked respondents to rate and rank these figures in terms of how responsible they should be for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks. We hypothesize that partisanship should bias how people attribute blame in the wake of government failure.  This research design builds on a previous TESS experiment demonstrating how party cues and other forms of relevant information affect how citizens assign blame.

"Partisan Bias and Blame Attribution: Citizen Attitudes Towards the Government Response to Hurricane Katrina"

Abstract:
How does partisanship affect how an individual attributes blame to different levels of government in response to perceived failures?  How does individual blame translate into policy preferences?  These fundamental questions in political behavior and psychology remain unanswered, despite the large number of studies in social psychology on blame attribution and the importance of party identification in the political behavior literature. We address this omission by proposing a survey experiment that explores individual attitudes regarding the government response to Hurricane Katrina by asking individuals to assess and rank officials by how much they should be blamed for the tragedy.  By exposing respondents to differing amounts of information about the public officials (including party affiliation), we expect to show a relationship between partisan identification and willingness to blame certain public officials for perceived policy failures, as well as a relationship between blame and actual policy preferences.

7) Yotam Margalit (Political Science) & Alexander Kuo (Political Science)

Project: "Situational Self Identification: Results from a Survey Experiment"

Abstract:
Recent comparative research on causes of identity choice focuses on its strategic nature. This paper proposes an alternative account of self-identification by advancing two claims.  First, adoption of self-identification can be non-instrumental and unconscious, in response to certain situations.  These situations make one identity more cognitively available than others. A change in the external circumstances could result in a different self-identification for reasons that have little to do with incentives or interests. Second, such changes in self-identification are more likely to occur among individuals with higher engagement with identity-related issues. We present data supporting this theory from an experiment embedded in a large-n survey of a representative sample of the United States. The results provide strong support for both claims.

8) Stefanie Mollborn, (Sociology)

Project: "Measuring Teenage Pregnancy Norms and Their Effects on Resource Provision."

Dataset: Measuring Teenage Pregnancy Norms and Their Effect on Resource Provision

Abstract:
This study focuses on perceptions of teenage pregnancy and on one process by which pregnancy norms may affect teenage parents- futures. Transition norms such as pregnancy norms are central to life course theory but have not been measured satisfactorily among adults. Importantly, the ways in which they influence life outcomes are poorly understood. This study addresses both shortcomings using an experimental design. By asking respondents to read a short vignette and answer several items, I address two primary research questions. First, do pregnancy norms in the United States vary by the age and sex of the parent-to-be? Second, do pregnancy norms affect how much material help family members are willing to provide to teenage parents? Results show that pregnancy norms are more strongly negative when the prospective parent is a teenager rather than an adult, and respondents who report stronger norms against pregnancy are less willing to provide resources to prospective parents.
http://www.experimentcentral.org/data/data.php?pid=390

9) Paul Sniderman (Political Science) & Michael Tomz (Political Science)

"Political Choice Spaces and Political Choice."

Dataset: A Behavioral Theory of Political Choice

Abstract:
This project is designed to further a behavioral approach to the analysis of political choice. The express analogy is to behavioral economics, integrating rational choice and social psychology. How citizens choose politically depends simultaneously on their acquired dispositions and on the alternatives open for choice. Political parties are central to this process because of their unique double-jointed role. On the one side, they are repositories of citizens' attachments. On the other side, parties structure "choice spaces" for citizens.

There is voluminous research on the first role of parties; relatively little on the second. In structuring political choice spaces, parties reduce the number of options available to citizens, portray them as competing courses of action, bundle policies into coherent agendas, and function as political brand names. Our research has investigated the signaling role of parties as political brand names.
http://www.experimentcentral.org/data/data.php?pid=140

10) Paul Sniderman (Political Science)

"Political Brand Names: Signaling and Constraint in Mass Belief Systems."

11) Michael Tomz (Political Science)

"Audience Costs in International Crises."

This page was last updated on 01/05/2007 .