Survey Experiment on Perspective-Taking and Household Labor Fairness Perceptions Among Fathers

This dataset contains data from an online survey experiment conducted with 984 fathers of young children in the United Kingdom and United States, recruited via the Prolific platform. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of 200 synthetic social media posts mimicking first-person accounts by mothers on the r/Mommit subreddit, generated using GPT-4.1. Following exposure, respondents completed two outcome scales: personal beliefs about mothers' household and childcare responsibilities (PB) and perceived fairness of the division of household and childcare tasks in their own family (PF), each comprising four items on a 5-point scale. The study investigates whether exposure to mothers' first-person accounts of household and childcare responsibilities influences fathers' fairness perceptions and normative beliefs, drawing on theories of perspective-taking and gendered divisions of labor. Latent treatment dimensions embedded in the stimuli were recovered using the Supervised Indian Buffet Process (SIBP). Eligibility criteria required participants to be fathers of at least one child born between 2015 and 2025, living with their children and partner, identifying as heterosexual, with English as their primary language. Keywords: survey experiment, household labor, gender inequality, perspective-taking, latent treatments, text as data, cognitive labor