Who am I and why am I choosing Laidlaw…
Greetings, Laidlaw Global Network! Through this essay, I aim to take you with me not only through my research journey over the summer but also through some reflections, learnings, friendships, and failures I experienced along the way. As a sophomore and international student at Harvard, I always felt that doing research was distant from my reality. Coming from a military school in Brazil and a school entirely in Portuguese, I always felt that doing research in an institution like Harvard, and especially in a language other than mine, would be something out of this world. Additionally, the way I comprehended what research was before coming to college changed greatly. As someone deeply passionate about public service and impact, I felt research would not be a great fit for me. At the end of the day, why would a hands-on person like me be doing something like sitting for hours and thinking about things such as research methods, how to write a good abstract, among other things?
This perspective was completely transformed this summer as I joined the first Harvard cohort of Laidlaw Scholars. With the other 14 passionate and academically curious peers, I became part of something bigger: the Laidlaw Scholars network. Right at the beginning of our first cohort meetings, I was amazed by the diversity of disciplines we had. From the study of maternal health to innovative financial methods for higher education, I embarked on a journey with passionate people whom I was luckily enough to end up knowing because of Laidlaw. By being surrounded by this unique cohort, I slowly learned that I could still have a lot of impact through my research, and in every cohort meeting, I was reminded of the reason why I was chosen to be there.
The challenging process of doing research for the first time…
Doing research in high school was not a reality back home, so the first summer with Laidlaw was my first time doing full-time research. "How should I find a mentor?" "How should I select my research topic?" "What are the best practices when dealing with data and sensitive issues?” Those were all genuine questions I encountered before and after I joined the Laidlaw cohort. Even though I felt lost, I knew the most important thing I should do would be to start: simply starting with topics of my interests, professors who potentially could become mentors, and ways to learn more about what doing research as an undergraduate looked like. Given my interest in Political Sciences and Economics, I decided to look for faculty that not only at the intersection of both disciplines, but also who could guide me through the process of translating research findings and insights into real-world impact. After some weeks of exploration and sending various emails, I found Professor Augustin Bergeron, Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard, with great experience in the field I was curious about exploring.
Inequality in highly divided societies, misperceptions, public policy, and my research…
My research project involved a broad range of fields, especially Political Economy and Political Psychology. In the project, our goal was to explore the paradox behind the fact that in highly divided societies, high income inequality rarely produces support for redistributive policies or class-based policies. Instead, political competition remains centered around ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. Even though there is a broad literature on supply-side accounts, such as the role of political elites and media actively reinforcing identity-based cleavages, our project aimed to investigate a demand-side account, focusing on the beliefs and preferences of ordinary people. Specifically, we wanted to investigate the role of misperceptions, that is, the systematic over- or underestimation of other groups’ characteristics or behaviors, in shaping group attitudes and political preferences.
Coming from a developing and growing country, Brazil, this topic could not be more important to me. My interest in politics sparked at the beginning of high school when I finally started to understand the heated political debates my parents had in the car. On January 8th of 2023, I saw the main political building of my country being destroyed by extremists on the right while seeing the left heating on all citizens from the right. As a young adult ready to vote in an election, I felt having no voice amid such a divided nation. Professor Augustin's research could transform the way we, as a society, understand economic policies, and I was ready to embark on this journey with him.
A case study on Lebanon
To explore the question on weather correcting misperceptions about the economic conditions of other identity groups changes policy preferences, we focused on Lebanon, a country where political life is organized around religious identity despite high levels of income inequality and widespread poverty that cut across religious sectarian lines. Religious divisions are reflected in widely held beliefs about economic disparities: Christians are often perceived as wealthy, while Shia are viewed as poor. Yet recent nationally representative survey data show that income distribution across the three major religious groups — Christian, Sunni, and Shia — is, in fact, remarkably similar today. This data motivated our research, especially considering the power the insights could have when applied to other countries with a situation similar to the Lebanese one.
To evaluate the effects of correcting these misperceptions, Professor Augustin and his team conducted a representative, face- to-face survey of 3,300 Lebanese residents in Greater Beirut, each belonging to one of the three major religious communities. As part of the survey, a randomized informational experiment was implemented. Treated respondents view a short, seven-minute video that combines stylized facts and qualitative testimonies in a fictional narrative portraying three young Lebanese men — one Christian, one Sunni, and one Shia — who face similar economic challenges. Both formats deliver the same core message: while income inequality in Lebanon is high, income differences between sectarian groups are relatively small. Most citizens, therefore, share more economically with members of other sects than with elites from their own. Our goal was to gain a deeper understanding of why identity-based politics persist in the face of economic polarization while evaluating a new class of scalable interventions that may help reverse this trend.
Why Lebanon?
Lebanon is experiencing one of the most severe economic crises of modern history. Since 2019, Lebanon’s real GDP has contracted by more than 60%, annual inflation has exceeded 200%, and the national poverty rate has risen from 12% in 2012 to 44% in 2022. According to recent surveys, only 7% of Lebanese express trust in the government, 82% believe corruption is pervasive, and fewer than 1 in 10 are satisfied with basic services such as electricity or healthcare. The roots of Lebanon’s current crisis lie in its sectarian political system. Lebanon is uniquely religiously diverse: it recognizes eighteen official religious sects, and all citizens are registered at birth as members of one of these groups. Unlike many countries in the region, Lebanon has no clear sectarian majority and a substantial Christian population. While eighteen sects are officially recognized, political power and state institutions are effectively dominated by three major communities — Christians, Sunnis, and Shias — the focus of my research project.
The previously mentioned inter-group economic misperceptions have strong political consequences. They can reinforce group-based political alignments, erode trust across communities, and reduce support for redistributive policies that would benefit lower-income individuals regardless of religious identity. Understanding each of those factors gave me a purpose while doing my daily research tasks. At the end of the day, I knew our intellectual investigation was a contribution to something bigger, specifically for a society affected by an economic crisis and war.
The ups and downs of our results and the learning (and reality) of doing hard academic work
By only reading academic papers on Economics and Political Science, I can tell that I had no idea how hard it can be to get meaningful results for my research question. When your research laboratory is the world and real people, you cannot control all variables, and you need to learn how to adapt yourself and what to learn for successful findings. We divided our main findings into different sections. First, assignment to the video successfully reduces perceived inequality between religious groups. We also tested whether the information shifts support for redistribution along economic—rather than sectarian—lines by self-reported policy outcomes such as support for increasing the top marginal income tax rate, etc. In general, respondents move toward targeted pro-poor policies—more progressivity at the top and greater social protection—rather than broad tax exemptions at the bottom.
Things were generally working pretty well until we got into the section on political preferences. At the end, saying your beliefs and preferences have changed is not the same as an actual change in your political behavior. In this way, to check if people’s belief updates would be translated into a change in their political preferences, we measured some political aspects, such as preferences for political institutions (sectarian vs civil or secular system) and support for sensitive political topics such as civil and inter-sect marriage. Our results, however, showed no treatment effect for real political behavior. Having this realization was a disappointment at first. I even questioned the purpose of the project once I thought that if we could not translate the findings into real change, why waste so much energy and time on all of this? What I realized later, however, was that this gap was not a failure, but rather evidence of how politics works in a polarized and sectarian society such as the Lebanese one. This gap, above all, was showing us that attitudes are more volatile than institutions, meaning that we cannot have information as the only source to correct problems that require big political changes.
Intellectual humility and real lessons learned
The disappointing result I first obtained really taught me something about intellectual humility and the importance of being wrong and changing the path. The goal of my project was not to confirm a hypothesis, but rather to investigate an important issue and its implications and possible solutions in a country experiencing a hard economic crisis affecting millions of people. Checking that something was not completely working was also useful evidence that contributed to the body of knowledge and action towards this problem.
Of course, this was not the only challenge I faced over the summer. I genuinely learned that doing science is hard. Sitting for hours alone, thinking about the same problem every day, and redesigning a method that you have been working on for a long time can be tiring and lonely. During the days I felt unmotivated, my fellow law scholars helped by reminding me that I was not the only one going through this: we were all together for a bigger purpose there. My research project also opened a new door for me by showing me that developmental economics and exploring the question of how countries can grow is something that I am deeply curious about.
Finally, as I step into a new semester at Harvard, I feel better equipped to understand how much work and effort sit behind the ordinary scientific articles and papers I read every week. Now I know that behind every paper there is a hypothesis and a team of researchers who worked tirelessly to test it, changing their methods after many failed experiments. As we prepare to think about our leadership in action project, I plan to continue with my summer reflections and learnings in order to plan a meaningful and unique second summer with Laidlaw. I do not think I will approach my LiA in the same way I would approach it at the beginning of the Laidlaw experience. I am now more interested in projects that can challenge my way of thinking, rather than confirming what I expected. I am grateful for all the mentors who followed me in my first research summer, and especially to the cohort, who inspired me with our conversations and research. Laidlaw exists because we believe that education changes lives, and education is only possible by the ethical production of knowledge and by bringing different perspectives to the table, and those are the principles that follow me as I step into a new phase of looking for organizations and planning my second summer with Laidlaw!