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A thorny debate persists as to the causes of the attacks that affected France since 2015. One view is that France is being attacked because of the secular and liberal values it embodies. According to a second thesis, France is attacked in response to its interventionist foreign policy. Our contribution proposes to respond to this debate via a behavioral, statistical and comparative analysis of attacks in the name of the Islamic State around the world from 2013 to 2019. Our analyses reveal that countries with liberal values (right to blasphemy, tradition of press caricature, and tolerance of homosexuality) are on average not subject to an increased number of attacks. Conversely, countries involved in air strikes in Iraq or Syria are significantly more affected. A temporal analysis confirms the causal effect of military strikes on attacks, and not the opposite effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractManipulations checks are postexperimental measures widely used to verify that subjects understood the treatment. Some researchers drop subjects who failed manipulation checks in order to limit the analyses to attentive subjects. This short report offers a novel illustration on how this practice may bias experimental results: in the present case, through confirming a hypothesis that is likely false. In a survey experiment, subjects were primed with a fictional news story depicting an economic decline versus prosperity. Subjects were then asked whether the news story depicted an economic decline or prosperity. Results indicate that responses to this manipulation check captured subjects’ preexisting beliefs about the economic situation. As a consequence, dropping subjects who failed the manipulation check mixes the effects of preexisting and induced beliefs, increasing the risk of false positive findings. Researchers should avoid dropping subjects based on posttreatment measures and rely on pretreatment measures of attentiveness.