Do gender and institutional signals matter to individuals' trust in an intellectual work? Pilot dataset

The initial pilot for a randomised experiment which investigates whether institutional and gender signals matter to individuals' valuation or trust in an intellectual work. The pilot was conducted at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at Nuffield College, Oxford, 2011. The experiment investigates whether institutional and gender signals matter to individuals' valuation or trust in an intellectual work. In this experiment, students were given two texts on the same topic and asked to rate which one was more truthful, justified, persuasive, relevant and interesting (i.e. variables related to epistemic trust). It is a randomised experiment in which different treatments were compared with each other: (i) the random allocation of gender signals (ii) the random allocation of institutional affiliation and (iii) the order in which texts were read. The dataset also includes a pre-experiment comprehension test on the texts as well as a post-experiment survey of participant characteristics. The experimental sessions were conducted with students at Jawaharhlal Nehru University in India, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and Oxford University.