Tackling misperceptions about immigrants with fact-checking interventions: A randomized survey experiment

• Main Authors: CHOI, Syngjoo, CHOI, Chung-Yoon, KIM
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Misperceptions; Immigrants; Incentives; Information; Policy preferences; Online experiment; Behavioral Economics; Labor Economics
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2690; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/3689/viewcontent/Immigration_and_misperception_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We conduct a randomized online survey experiment to study the impact of fact-checking offers and financial incentives on misperceptions about immigrants. We find that natives overestimate the number of immigrants and the social and economic costs of immigration. Offering a free check of the factual information about immigrants reduces these misperceptions; it becomes more effective when combined with financial incentives. However, more than half of the participants never took up offers to check factual information. Using a model of information search with limited attention, we identify the presence of non-negligible costs of information search and processing, which limits the effectiveness of the fact-checking interventions. Finally, we find that the fact-checking interventions moderately improve natives' attitudes toward immigrants but affect neither their policy preferences nor giving behavior toward immigrants.