Secondary Benefits of Manipulation Checks: Three Illustrations From Behavioral Public Administration

Abstract

Manipulation checks in behavioral public administration are commonly used and reported to determine if the experimental and control group have received different treatments. This paper uses three experiments to argue that manipulation checks for experimental treatments can have secondary benefits that can be used to improve the quality of behavioral work in the field. The three cases address the importance of using more clear terms in experimental manipulations (government v. public), using different on-line platforms to recruit experimental subjects (Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Data.Spring), and whether larger payments more produce more attentive subjects.