Three different sets of experiments were conducted to assess the public's direct response to fictitious statements attributed to President Barack Obama. The first two experiments were conducted at the Wharton Behavioral Lab on October 23, 2013, and then again with a new set of participants the next year on May 21, 2014. The experiment was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and surveyed 283 adults from the Philadelphia area. Given the location of the experiment, there was an overrepresentation of students and young adults.

I fielded the study a third time, attempting to reach a larger group of individuals across the nation. From July 17 to July 20, 2014, the surveying company Survey Sampling International applied my laboratory experiment to 2,041 individuals across the nation. The group of individuals who were surveyed were representative of the national population in terms of geographical region, age, gender, race, and political ideology. Exactly half of the 2,041 participants were selected at random to receive the same fictitious race-related statements from President Obama that I had used only months earlier in the laboratory setting, and the other half did not receive any statements. Both groups were later asked about their political preferences. Both groups received a debriefing statement at the end of the survey that indicated the remarks purported to be from President Obama were fictitious remarks. Chapter 3 provides results of the national sample.