Amma Panin
(CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
will give a presentation on
Do Exclusionary Policies Reduce Cognitive Bandwidth and Harm Economic Outcomes of Marginalized Groups?
Abstract: Ethno-nationalist governments frequently adopt policies that challenge the status of target ethnic minorities as equal members of the nation. Such policies – even when purely symbolic – may have tangible consequences for the marginalized groups they target. We propose that exclusionary policies negatively impact the cognitive bandwidth of individuals belonging to marginalized groups. We test this hypotheses in India, where the party in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), promotes a nationalist ideology that favours Hindus over Muslims. We employ close to 1000 workers in the Indian state of West Bengal to work on basic data entry and information processing tasks. We randomize whether workers encounter content that mentions either symbolic or material exclusionary policies (or placebo policies). We measure how exposure to exclusionary policies affects productivity in a separate, unrelated transcription task. We also give workers the opportunity to select one of two payment contracts, and we measure how treatment changes the probability of choosing the “wrong” contract in terms of earnings. Our main outcomes are accompanied by cognitively demanding tests (such as, Raven’s Matrices and a numerical Stroop task) that allow us to establish whether the treatments increase cognitive load as hypothesised.