Leader: Valeria Maggian (UNIVE); Other collaborator(s):
The age gap in voting behavior has grown stronger in the last thirty years, while citizens face an increasing amount of information during the electoral campaigns. As ageing is associated with a decline in cognitive abilities, elderly people might be more likely to suffer from biases when processing information. By means of laboratory experiments, our objective is to disentangle the heterogeneity in preferences from differences in information processing. If heterogeneity among generations depends also on information processing and not only on preferences, politicians and interest groups can target subgroups in the population and distort political outcomes by changing beliefs, which can be more easily influenced, with respect to preferences.
Brief description of the activities and of the intermediate results
November 2023 - March 2024. In this period we have worked on finalizing the experimental design aimed at investigating the effects of cognitive biases in affecting beliefs and individuals choices within the political environment, also considering its relation with the age of the individuals. The implementation of the experiment will be made by an external agency, and the purchase of this service has been formally approved by the Department of Economics' council at Ca' Foscari University in March 2024.
Main policy, industrial and scientific implications
Coming soon
Our aim is to study the behavioral heterogeneity in information processing between elderly and young adults and its effect on (voting) decisions. We will conduct a set of Computer Assisted Personal Interviews with a representative sample of the Italian population of about 2000 individuals, with a special focus on individuals aged more than 50 years old. Each individual will go through both and experiment and a questionnaire, the latter being aimed to collect socio-demographic information as well as to link our data to SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. In the experiment, each participant will take a decision after being exposed to different informational scenarios, identical in terms of informational content but characterized by either correlated or uncorrelated signals about the true state of the world, which in turn affects their payoff. Our study will shed light on the current debate concerning the consequences of a biased information processing on individual and group choice. As the elderly have been shown to be more prone to cognitive decline, our experiment will allow to measure the extent to which correlation neglect may explain the heterogeneity in voting behavior. Our study would carry strong policy implications in modern societies, characterized by population ageing and an increasing presence of informational redundancies of different news reports, both in social networks and traditional media. We have now received ethical approval for our project and we are about to open a call for the implementation of the study. We expect the data collection to be finished by January 2025.
Coming soon