624/2022 Sanval Nasim and Andreas Stegmann

We conduct a field experiment to study whether concerns to preserve an anti-liberal self-image affect low cost, private school owners' willingness to explore a collaboration with a liberal Pakistani NGO. While explicitly revealing the NGO's liberal motivation to school owners has a significant impact on beliefs about the NGO's objectives, on average, we find only limited evidence that treated school owners are less willing to explore a collaboration with our partner NGO. However, heterogeneous treatment effects suggest that differences in political identity cause negative reactions among the minority of school owners expressing conservative beliefs during a seemingly unrelated follow-up survey.