Economics Seminar-"AI and Multidimensional Political Identity"

This project examines how different dimensions of political identity shape people’s responses to artificial intelligence. In a randomized experiment with more than 600 participants, we ask people to reflect on either their economic identity, cultural identity, or no identity before evaluating policy responses to AI-related concerns involving jobs, inequality, national security, and discrimination. Cultural identity reflection widens differences between traditional and progressive participants across several policy domains, while economic identity reflection produces much more limited effects. At the same time, we find little evidence that these patterns are driven by changes in beliefs about AI’s consequences. The results suggest that identity can shape how people translate a common set of perceived consequences into policy preferences, which identity people bring to AI can change how they trade off its economic and social consequences.