People's perceptions about others play an important role in shaping their own attitudes and behaviors, as well as social norms more broadly. This review presents a meta-analysis of the recent empirical literature that examines perceptions about others in the field, covering over a million observations for a total of 434 elicited perceptions. We document a number of stylized facts. Misperceptions about others are widespread, asymmetric, much larger when about out-group members, and positively associated with one's own attitudes. Experimental treatments to re-calibrate misperceptions generally work as intended; they sometimes lead to meaningful changes in behaviors, though this often occurs only immediately after the treatments. We discuss different conceptual frameworks that could explain the origin, persistence, and rigidity of misperceptions about others. We point to several directions for future research.

Developing AI technology requires data. In many domains, government data far exceeds in magnitude and scope data collected by the private sector, and AI firms often gain access to such data when providing services to the state. We argue that such access can stimulate commercial AI innovation in part because data and trained algorithms are shareable across government and commercial uses. We gather comprehensive information on firms and public security procurement contracts in China's facial recognition AI industry. We quantify the data accessible through contracts by measuring public security agencies' capacity to collect surveillance video. Using a triple-differences strategy, we find that data-rich contracts, compared to data-scarce ones, lead recipient firms to develop significantly and substantially more commercial AI software. Our analysis suggests a contribution of government data to the rise of China’s facial recognition AI firms, and that states’ data collection and provision policies could shape AI innovation.

We test whether participation in one protest within a political movement increases subsequent protest attendance, and why. To identify an effect of protest participation, we randomly, indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into participation in an antiauthoritarian protest. To identify the effects of social interactions, we randomize the intensity of this treatment across major-cohort cells. We find that experimentally-induced protest participation is significantly associated with protest attendance one year later, though political beliefs and preferences are unaffected. Persistent political engagement is greatest among individuals in the cells with highest treatment intensity, suggesting that social interactions sustained persistent political engagement.

We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engage in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including public policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps at the individual level between Republicans and Democrats in self-reported social distancing, beliefs about personal COVID risk, and beliefs about the future severity of the pandemic.

How do reported incidence, knowledge, and behaviors regarding coronavirus disease 2019 vary across sociodemographic characteristics in the US? In this survey study, the largest differences in coronavirus disease 2019–related knowledge and behaviors were associated with race/ ethnicity, sex, and age. African American participants, men, and people younger than 55 years were less likely to know how the disease is spread, were less likely to know the symptoms of coronavirus disease 2019, washed their hands less frequently, and left the home more often. These findings suggest that more effort is needed to increase accurate information and encourage appropriate behaviors among minority communities, men, and younger people.

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored Internet. We track subjects' media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, economic beliefs, political attitudes, and behaviors over 18 months. We find 4 main results: (i) free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sensitive information; (ii) temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicating that demand is not permanently low; (iii) acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and (iv) social transmission of information is statistically significant but small in magnitude. We calibrate a simple model to show that the combination of low demand for uncensored information and the moderate social transmission means China's censorship apparatus may remain robust to a large number of citizens receiving access to an uncensored Internet.

Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of her beliefs about others' turnout. We conduct a field experiment that re-calibrates individuals' beliefs about others' protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong's ongoing anti-authoritarian movement. We elicit subjects' planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others' participation, in an incentivized manner. One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others' protest plans, and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner. After the protest, we elicit subjects' actual participation. This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others' protest participation on subjects' own turnout. In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability. We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests.

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students' political attitudes, exploiting a major textbook reform in China between 2004 and 2010. The sharp, staggered introduction of the new curriculum across provinces allows us to identify its causal effects. We examine government documents articulating desired consequences of the reform, and identify changes in textbooks reflecting these aims. A survey we conducted reveals that the reform was often successful in shaping attitudes, while evidence on behavior is mixed. Studying the new curriculum led to more positive views of China's governance, changed views on democracy, and increased skepticism toward free markets.

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat’s power; and (ii) the autocrat’s demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those benefiting it directly. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI, and increased AI procurement suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.

Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We aim to describe and understand China's policy experimentation since 1980, among the largest and most systematic in recent history. We collect comprehensive data on policy experimentation conducted in China over the past four decades. We find three main results. First, more than 80% of the experiments exhibit positive sample selection in terms of a locality's economic development, and much of this can be attributed to misaligned incentives across political hierarchies. Second, local politicians allocate more resources to ensure the experiments' success, and such effort is not replicable when policies roll out to the entire country. Third, the presence of sample selection and strategic effort is not fully accounted for by the central government, thus affecting policy learning and distorting national policies originating from the experimentation. Taken together, these results suggest that while China’s bureaucratic and institutional conditions make policy experimentation at such scale possible, the complex political environments can also limit the scope and bias the direction of policy learning.

Major crises — from terrorist attacks to outbreaks of disease — bring the trade-off between individual civil liberties and national security or well-being into sharp relief. In this paper, we study to what extent individual preferences for protecting rights and civil liberties are elastic to health insecurity. We design and conduct representative surveys involving approximately 550,000 responses across 15 countries, including China and the United States, during many months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March 2020 until January 2021. We document significant heterogeneity across countries and demographic groups in willingness to sacrifice rights for public welfare. Citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country, as are those with prior experience in Communist regimes. Leveraging naturally-occurring variation as well as experimental approaches, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in health security concerns increases willingness to sacrifice civil liberties by approximately 72%-92% of the difference between the average Chinese and U.S. citizen. Stated preferences correlate with observed behavior including demand for tracing apps, donations, and petitions.

Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.

US voters exaggerate the differences in attitudes held by Republicans and Democrats on a range of socioeconomic and political issues, and greater perceived polarization is associated with greater political engagement and affective polarization. In this paper, we examine the drivers of such perceived partisan differences. We find that a model of stereotypes, where distortions are stronger for issues that are more salient to voters, captures important features of the data. First, perceived partisan differences are predictable from the actual differences across parties, in particular from the relative prevalence of extreme attitudes. Second, perceived partisan differences are larger on issues that individuals consider more important. Third, issue salience increases the tendency to over-weigh extreme types. Exploiting nationally representative survey data, we show that the end of the Cold War in 1991, which shifted US voters’ attention away from external threats, increased perceived, relative to actual, partisan differences on domestic issues. The rise was stronger for issues with more stereotypical partisan differences. The reverse pattern occurred after the terrorist attacks in 2001, when attention swung back towards external threats. Consistent with the mechanism of salience-modulated stereotyping, beliefs about political groups can shift dramatically even when the underlying partisan differences change little.

Political trust is the foundation of authoritarian regimes’ legitimacy, and it is often sustained by propaganda. When does propaganda reach its limit, and what are the consequences when propaganda is falsified? We study the causal effect of the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) on survivors’ political distrust. Policy failures led to the Famine, but the propaganda blamed drought for the disaster. Information that directly contradicted the propaganda -- experiences of severe Famine in the absence of abnormal drought conditions -- was quasi-randomly available to some citizens, but not others. Using a nationally representative survey, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to compare individuals who were exposed to different intensities of the Famine across regions with different levels of drought during the Famine. The Famine survivors inferred the government’s liability from starvation experiences and the drought conditions, and they were more likely to dismiss the propaganda and blame the government for the Famine if they observed regular weather conditions during the Famine. As a result, these individuals expressed significantly less trust in the government. Costs of falsified propaganda are substantial, since the dampened political trust has turned into a stable political ideology. The distrust persists even half a century after the Famine, has been transmitted to the subsequent generation, and has spilled over to a broad range of political attitudes unrelated to the Famine.

Which fundamental factors are associated with individuals holding democratic, anti-authoritarian ideologies? We conduct a survey eliciting Hong Kong university students' political attitudes and behavior in an ongoing pro-democracy movement. We construct indices measuring students' anti-authoritarianism, and link these to a comprehensive profile of fundamental economic preferences; personalities; cognitive abilities; and family backgrounds. We find that fundamental economic preferences, particularly risk tolerance and pro-social preferences, are the strongest predictors of anti-authoritarian ideology and behavior. We also study simultaneously determined outcomes, arguably both cause and consequence of ideology. Examining these, we find that anti-authoritarians are more pessimistic about Hong Kong's political outlook and about their fellow students' support for the movement; their social networks are more political; they consume different media; and, they are more politically informed than other students. Our extraordinarily rich data suggest that individuals' deep preferences should be considered alongside payoffs and beliefs in explaining political behavior.

Beliefs about whether effort pays off govern some of the most fundamental choices individual make. This paper uses China’s Cultural Revolution to understand how these beliefs can be affected, how they impact behavior, and how they are transmitted across generations. During the Cultural Revolution, China’s college admission system based on entrance exams was suspended for a decade until 1976, effectively depriving an entire generation of young people of the opportunity to access higher education (the “lost generation”). Using data from a nationally representative survey, we compare cohorts who graduated from high school just before and after the college entrance exam was resumed. We find that members of the “lost generation” who missed out on college because they were born just a year or two too early believe that effort pays off to a much lesser degree, even 40 years into their adulthood. However, they invested more in their children’s education, and transmitted less of their changed beliefs to the next generation, suggesting attempts to safeguard their children from sharing their misfortunes.

Citizens' preference for redistribution determines many key political economy outcomes. In this project, we aim to understand how do ancestors' redistributive experiences affect the descendants' preference for redistribution. We conduct a survey experiment under the historical backdrop of the wealth equalization movements during the Communist Revolution in China (1947-1956). We remind a random subset of respondents of these movements that their ancestors went through. We find that on average, making the historical experiences salient turns the respondents significantly and persistently more favorable towards government redistribution. We show that the treatment effect is not driven by changes in apolitical preferences, beliefs of current inequality, or knowledge of the movements. Salience in history influences the mental framework when respondents think of redistribution: respondents are reminded of the specific family experiences during past redistribution, and they are triggered to project similar redistribution in the future.