Thursday, January 29, 2026 16:00 - 17:00

This event is both online and in person.

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Online participants are welcome to join us via Zoom:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_cepwell) to receive event updates and the Zoom link to the seminar.

About this event

Mental health is vital for well-being and productivity, yet investment remains chronically low. We study how different framings of mental health investment affect cooperation and donations using a pre-registered online experiment across five European countries (N = 8,312). Participants were randomly assigned to receive information emphasizing either individual benefits (Private Perspective), collective benefits (Public Perspective), or prevalence data (Neutral Perspective). All treatments significantly increase cooperation in a Public Goods Game and donations in a Charity Dictator Game, suggesting intrinsic motivation drives behavior. Only the Private Perspective increases personal normative expectations, while empirical expectations remain unaffected?suggesting that interventions influence moral beliefs more than beliefs about others? actions. All treatments reduce self-reported mental health stigma, consistent with evidence from a list experiment, suggesting stigma reduction as a key mechanism. Heterogeneity analyses show stronger treatment effects among individuals with lived experience or prior concern, and reduced contributions under collective framings when public provision is perceived as adequate?consistent with a substitution effect between public and private action. Donations also decline in post- communist countries, aligning with historically lower institutional trust and weaker norms of private giving. These findings highlight how individual perceptions and institutional legacies shape behavioural responses, and suggest that perceived adequacy of public provision can backfire by discouraging private engagement?potentially trapping societies in a bad equilibrium of persistent underinvestment in mental health.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

Online participants are welcome to join us via Zoom:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_cepwell) to receive event updates and the Zoom link to the seminar.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

This series is part of the CEP's Community Wellbeing programme.