When do people agree that others not (re)pay their credits with financial system?

This project presents the pre-analysis plans and design for a series of survey experiments conducted in 2025 and 2026 to study how Chilean citizens understand and evaluate debt. It focuses on both informational and moral mechanisms shaping public attitudes toward student loan forgiveness and the legitimacy of non-payment in consumer credit. The research engages with two complementary but analytically distinct strands of literature. On the one hand, it draws on work on public opinion, welfare legitimacy, and distributive justice to examine attitudes toward state-backed student debt relief. On the other hand, it builds on economic sociology and research on debt-related social movements to study how individuals evaluate repayment obligations and default in market-based credit relations. These perspectives are not integrated into a single framework but instead operate in parallel, allowing the project to capture different dimensions of how credit relations are morally and politically evaluated. Experiments 1 and 2 — Information and motivated reasoning The first two experiments test how exposure to objective and partisan information affects citizens’ agreement with the Chilean government’s proposed project for student loan relief and forgiveness (Crédito con Aval del Estado, CAE). Experiment 1 examines the effects of informational cues about delinquency rates and government responsibility, manipulating whether participants receive data linking rising default to specific political narratives or to the structural payment burdens faced by borrowers. Experiment 2 focuses on socioeconomic information, exposing participants to factual data about the income distribution and living conditions of student loan borrowers. Together, these experiments evaluate how exposure to real-world arguments and political frames—drawn directly from the Chilean public debate—shapes aggregate attitudes toward forgiveness, responsibility attribution, and perceptions of fairness. Experiment 3 — Individual-level deservingness judgments (NICER/CARIN) The third stage shifts to the individual level, examining how people morally evaluate the deservingness of specific student loan borrowers. This experiment is explicitly grounded in the NICER/CARIN framework, allowing us to identify how different deservingness criteria structure moral judgments. Inspired by SoRelle and Laws (2024), this conjoint experiment presents respondents with hypothetical borrower profiles that vary along key attributes associated with the NICER/CARIN dimensions, including type of higher education institution, family socioeconomic background, debt amount, income, repayment status, time repaying, and academic completion. Each participant evaluates 14 profiles (7 pairs), deciding who deserves more forgiveness (forced-choice task) and rating each profile’s moral deservingness. This design captures how respondents weigh structural and behavioral cues—such as economic need, perceived control, and repayment effort—when deciding who is more “deserving” of state-supported debt relief. Experiment 4 — Moral evaluations of default in consumer credit The fourth experiment extends the project beyond student loans to the domain of consumer credit, focusing on how citizens evaluate the legitimacy of non-payment in third-party situations. This stage is grounded in economic sociology and in research on debt-related social movements, emphasizing the relational and moral dimensions of credit markets. This conjoint experiment analyzes how individuals assess whether a borrower is justified in not repaying a loan, incorporating attributes related both to the debtor (e.g., relational accounting, economic insecurity, default timing) and to the creditor (e.g., lending practices, and perceived fairness of credit conditions). Participants are presented with pairs of hypothetical cases and are asked to indicate which individual is more justified in not paying their debt (forced-choice task), as well as to rate each profile in terms of their agreement with the borrower’s decision not to (re)pay. This design allows us to capture the conditions under which respondents agree with default. By focusing on market-based credit relations, this experiment examines how individuals draw moral boundaries around repayment obligations and under what conditions non-payment becomes acceptable.