Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 16 November 2022 – Room LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 16 November 2022, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Alicia von Schenk (University of Würzburg) will be talking about „The Causal Effect of Communication in Echo Chambers on Biased Beliefs”.
More information can be found here:
This paper presents a laboratory experiment to isolate the causal effect of communicating in echo chambers on the prevalence of biased beliefs in the population. For this purpose, we exogenously manipulate subjects’ incentives to form motivated beliefs about others’ behavior and fairness. We further vary whether subjects with the same incentive to distort their own belief can communicate via free-form chats. We find that communication – even in the exogenously created echo chambers – reduces the bias in individuals’ beliefs. Additionally, we analyze how the communication with like-minded individuals affects the distribution of beliefs in the experiment. Without the incentives to form motivated beliefs, we have two opinion camps. Motivated reasoning without chatting reduces the fair opinion camp at the expense of the unfair opinion camp. Chatting undoes motivated reasoning and thereby leads to the reemergence of the original fair opinion camp.