People often care about how they are perceived by others, and this motivates many individuals to act in a way that sends a favourable signal about their character. In this paper, we introduce a decomposition of signalling into its direct and indirect components. Behaviour can influence a person's image directly, and it can influence a person's image indirectly by changing people's beliefs about important, unobserved behaviours. We show in an experiment on charitable giving that this distinction is necessary for understanding signalling behaviour. Many donors engage in wasteful signalling with actions that are in themselves unimportant for the donors' image (the number of charities they give to), but only if this action changes beliefs about important, unobserved behaviour (how much they donate). Understanding the two components of signalling is key for designing organisations to avoid strategic and wasteful signalling.
Many policies affect future inequality, from taxation to investments in education. Therefore, citizens' support for these policies may depend on their beliefs about how inequality will evolve over time. In three large-scale experiments, I examine whether individuals are able to predict how exponential economic growth influences inequality, and I examine how beliefs about inequality influence people's preferences for redistribution. I find that most people underestimate how much inequality increases in the presence of growth, but this does not matter for policy support, as beliefs about inequality do not affect preferences for redistribution. Rather, what matters is whether people know if redistribution will come at a personal cost to themselves.
In many countries, partisans have become increasingly biased in how they evaluate others based on political affiliation. We suggest that this increase in affective polarization may in part be caused by changes in the global power distribution which caused many countries to experience a long period without external (military) threats. To study the importance of external threats, we conduct a priming experiment to examine how making Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 salient causally influences affective polarization and collaboration in the U.S. We find that priming Americans with Russia's military aggression leads to a modest reduction in affective polarization and an increase in cooperativeness as measured by behavior in an incentivized coordination game. Surprisingly, the effect of making Russia's invasion salient does not depend on perceived cross-party disagreement about the conflict. These results suggest that researchers should also consider international relations to understand within-country polarization and willingness to collaborate.