Authors: Alla Hale, Grant Whittington, Adam Yang, and Siobhan Harrington
The Experiment
We conduct a randomized, controlled field experiment to evaluate the effect of news on American's stress levels. Our experiment aims to address the question of: do Americans who are exposed to article summaries specifically about Trump have higher perceived stress levels than those who are exposed to news about topics other than Trump?
In addition to the question regarding Trump, it could be possible to envision that any news could increase stress levels. So we ask the second question: do Americans who are exposed to current news summaries in general have higher perceived stress levels than those who did not get exposed to any of our selected news summaries?
We hypothesize that the treatment group exposed to Trump related news will have a higher average perceived level of stress than the placebo group. Additionally, we expect the placebo group exposed to other news stories, will have a higher average perceived stress level than the control group. Furthermore, we expect heterogeneous treatment effects between Republican and Democrat subjects, so we implement blocking by political affiliation. We expect to see republicans to have a smaller treatment effect than Democrats. In the following sections, we address the methodology of the experiment conducted, the resulting changes made after a soft launch, and finally the analysis and conclusions from the data collected.
Conclusions
For the first part of the study, we find that overall, participants in all groups experience more stress when exposed to news summaries than when not. The implications of this may be far reaching. In a climate where many complain about the detrimental effects of stress on their health, it may be worthwhile to limit news consumption in general.
For the second part of the study, we find surprisingly that including Trump in news summaries results in lower stress levels on average than news summaries not about Trump. This is contrary to our original hypothesis that exposure to Trump in the headlines would result in higher stress levels than the general news.
However, it is necessary to examine these results in context. Please read the report for full details.