Where Is Agrabah? Associations Evoked by Real & Fictitious Country Names

• In Event: Innovations in Experimental Methods

Abstract

Informational equivalence matters greatly to experimental researchers. The uneven background knowledge of respondents regarding international relations, however, poses a special challenge. Some survey experiments use the names of real countries to enhance experimental realism, while others use fictitious country names as placeholders or placebos and still others refrain from using specific country names at all. This raises an important methodological questions: can respondents accurately identify and distinguish real from fictitious country names? What associations, if any, do real and fictitious country names evoke? Little research has been done regarding these questions, potentially rendering some experiments susceptible to inadvertently “priming” respondents by employing various real and fictitious country names. Other experiments, however, may leave experimental stones unturned by not using country names as a potential treatment if they reliably evoke particular associations. Building an index of country names, real and fake, and respondents’ assessments of them across multiple dimensions thereby holds the promise of both removing unwanted variation and potentially enabling desirable manipulations. We investigate these issues through a new set of survey experiments analyzing the associations a sample of real and fake country name evoke in the U.S. public.

Author

• Dov H. Levin, University of Hong Kong