Social proximity and misinformation: Experimental Evidence from a mobile phone-base campaign

The script stressed the rights of women and girls; the costs of early marriage in terms of health and education for both the young married couple and their children and the perceived costs of deviating from prevailing age-of-marriage norms. [...] The facilitator followed a carefully scripted list of questions about the experience of participants with the movie, the positions of the various characters, and the consequences of early marriage. [...] Based on this measure the variables are: binary variables that are equal to one if the father allocates a non-zero number of tokens to the mother, and zero otherwise (Row 5); count variables of the number of tokens allocated to the mother (Row 6); a binary variable equal to one if the father reports that the mother makes the final decision about the daughter, when asked who from all household memb. [...] More specifically, we test that (i) fathers update their beliefs the same in the Male arm as in the Female+Male arm, and weakly less in the Female arm, and (ii) mothers update their beliefs the same in the Female arm as in the Female+Male arm, and weakly less in the Male arm. [...] In line with the predictions, we find no difference in the belief updating by fathers in the Male arm compared the Female+Male arm and, similarly, we find no difference in the belief updating by mothers in the Female arm compared to the Female+Male arm.