Strong reciprocal judgments: Differences in approval for welfare provision based on recipient deservingness cues

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines whether simple deservingness cues can shift individual opinion on the provision of welfare to a hypothetical welfare recipient. Using a pre-registered design and analysis plan based on earlier work by Lene Aarøe & Michael Bang Petersen, I conduct an experiment using students recruited by email from the Stockholm School of Economics with one control and two treatment groups. The control group received no cues about the hypothetical welfare recipient. The two treatments were given either a cue signalling deservingness, termed an 'unlucky cue', or a cue signalling undeservingness, termed a 'lazy cue'. Results were obtained first across all three treatments and showed that there was a significant difference in responses between the three experimental groups. Pairwise comparisons showed differences in responses between the 'lazy cue' group and the other two but could not reject the null hypothesis of no difference in responses between the 'no cue' and 'unlucky cue' groups. I assert that these results have implications for how to conduct experiments on deservingness cues and may imply that subject predispositions influence the outcomes of such experiments.