Norwegian conscripts arrive at boot camp straight out of school. They are assigned at random to a shared room and they live in it for the next eight weeks. Whatever the culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it. We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents. Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a poor record. It can even inspire a backlash. Instead, they included two pieces of information in a 20-minute enrolment survey. One fact was about how women score on the army’s own end-of-service assessments. The other was about what last year’s recruits really thought about crude sexual jokes. Eight weeks later, the researchers came back to see what had changed for the 949 recruits.



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