Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences is Having A Special Competition for Young Investigators
Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is an NSF-funded initiative. Investigators propose survey experiments to be fielded using a nationally representative Internet platform via NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel (see http:/tessexperiments.org for more information). While anyone can submit a proposal to TESS at any time through our regular mechanism, we are having a Special Competition for Young Investigators. Graduate students and individuals who received their PhD in 2016 or after are eligible.
To give some examples of experiments we’ve done: one TESS experiment showed that individuals are more likely to support a business refusing service to a gay couple versus an interracial couple, but were no more supportive of religious reasons for doing so versus nonreligious reasons. Another experiment found that participants were more likely to attribute illnesses of obese patients as due to poor lifestyle choices and of non-obese patients to biological factors, which, in turn, resulted in participants being less sympathetic to overweight patients—especially when patients are female. TESS has also fielded an experiment about whether the opinions of economists influence public opinion on different issues, and the study found that they do on relatively technical issues but not so much otherwise.
The proposals that win our Special Competition will be able to be fielded at up to twice the size of a regular TESS study. We will begin accepting proposals for the Special Competition on January 1, 2019, and the deadline is March 1, 2019. Full details about the competition are available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/yic.html.