Working papers
- Culture and the Persistence of Educational Inequality: Lessons from the Muslim-Christian Education Gap in Africa
- When Hearts Meet Minds: Complementary Effects of Perspective-Getting and Information on Refugee Inclusion (with Claire Adida, Adeline Lo, Lauren Prather, and Scott Williamson)
On-going projects
Can fiction make the climate crisis real? An experiment in five countries (with Andy Harris)
This study examines the efficacy of narrative fiction on climate concern, emotions, climate justice position, and climate policy positions in the US, Spain, Germany, Nigeria, and India. Using an online survey of 10,000 respondents, we compare the effect of a fictional narrative about the potential consequences of climate change with a factual treatment, which is an edited version of a real news article covering a scientific article about climate change. We also compare treatments to a control condition. In both cases the subject of the text is extreme heat events. The fictional narrative is modified from a real novel, The Ministry for the Future. This novel opens with the scene we include as the fictional treatment and describes a heat wave that kills millions of people in India in 2025. We modify this text as discussed below but use much of the original language from the opening paragraphs. The scientific text comes from a 2017 Deutsche Welle news article, which describes the findings from a recently published scientific article on the likelihood of deadly heat waves in the coming decades. We find that compared to the control condition, both fact and fiction treatments affected emotional reactions to climate change and increased respondents’ perception of the risk of a severe and fatal heat event in their own country. As expected, the treatments had little effect on policy preferences or behavioral intent to address climate issues. We also find that respondents reacted more strongly to versions of the fictional treatment in which the poor were disproportionately affected by the heat event.
Limits on Learning: Selective Incorporation and Retention of Political Information (with Andrew Little and Pia Raffler)
Does motivated reasoning limit the degree to which voters learn in response to political information, and the efficacy of interventions which aim to help them make informed decisions? A challenge for answering these questions is that motivated beliefs can be hard if not impossible to distinguish from rational beliefs. In this paper we develop a theory and diagnostic tool to detect motivated reasoning which does not focus on changes in beliefs but on whether new information is accepted or remembered in the first place. We then use this tool to reanalyze data from a set of experiments which found mixed effects of information treatments on voting behavior. Subjects who receive informational treatments are more likely to answer recall questions correctly when the information aligns with their preferences, which would appear to be a sign of motivated memory. However, we find similar patterns among the control group who received no information, which indicates the differences are likely driven by prior beliefs or guessing rather than selective memory. In sum, we find little evidence of motivated reasoning in this set of studies, and provide guidance for how to test for this phenomenon in other settings.
Air Pollution Awareness and Action across Three African Cities (with Andy Harris and Peter van der Windt)
Air pollution has been increasing in cities across the developing world, and is particularly acute in urban centers of Africa and Asia. It contributes to as many as 7 million deaths annually, though public awareness about the causes and consequences of this health risk are quite low. In a first study, we conduct an online panel survey with over 4000 Ugandan respondents to measure awareness, knowledge, behavior, and policy preferences about air quality before and after the incorporation of air quality reporting into a major news broadcaster, Next Media. The baseline survey was conducted in April and May 2023 and Next Media began incorporating air quality reporting into broadcasts in June 2023. We will be conducting a follow-up survey in the coming months to examine whether and how knowledge about air pollution has changed over time. A second study, still in the design phase, takes the form of a field experiment. The goal of this study is to identify the types of messaging and strategies for disseminating air quality information that are most effective in increasing knowledge and supporting behavior change related to air pollution. We will be conducting the study in three African cities, Goma, Kampala, and Nairobi, with a baseline survey beginning in fall 2023.
African Migration to the GCC (with Haggai Matsiko)
African migration to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has increased dramatically in the past decade, and as someone living in the Gulf and spending significant amounts of time in Uganda, I have been able to witness this growing trend first-hand. As of 2017 there were an estimated 3.4 million Africans working in GCC countries, comprising up to 11 and 12 percent of the total population in countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, respectively. Gulf countries are an increasingly popular destination for Ugandan workers in particular, to where more than 25,000 migrated in 2021 alone. Despite the large and growing importance of migration to the Gulf, and some coverage in media and non-governmental reports, there has been very little scholarship investigating the diversity of experiences of migrant workers to the Gulf as well as the economic and political consequences of this migration. Unlike previous waves of migration, this new form is necessarily temporary, as there is no path to citizenship for migrants to the GCC. The vast majority of Africans who have traveled for work to the GCC will ultimately return home in the coming years. How will their experiences, socially, politically, and economically, affect them and their communities when they return home? Using a combination of interviews and surveys in both the UAE and Uganda, we examine how migration shapes migrants’ beliefs and aspirations, as well as the economic and political impact of mass migration and remittances in source countries.
Melina Raquel Platas 