Partisanship Unmasked? The Role of Politics and Social Norms in COVID-19 Mask-Wearing Behavior

This preregistration documents an experimental intervention implemented in the third wave of a three-wave panel survey measuring public opinion about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus in the United States. (This study also includes a separately preregistered experiment as well as observational survey data and data on web browsing behavior that will be analyzed as descriptive/exploratory rather than confirmatory.) Respondents will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a condition in which they are provided with the percentage of Americans who report wearing a mask, a condition in which they are provided with the percentage of Democrats who report wearing a mask, a condition in which they are provided with the percentage of Republicans who report wearing a mask, or a control condition in which they are provided with no information. This preregistration, which describes the analysis of the experiment described above, was written with data from wave 1 and 2 data in hand. The experiment in question was conducted in wave 3.