Abstrakt
We investigate whether biased beliefs play a role in the persistent demand for postdoc-toral training in science. We elicit the beliefs and career preferences of doctoral students at 56 U.S. chemistry departments through a survey combined with a field experiment, in which we randomize the provision of information to a subset of respondents on histori-cal academic placements by department.
We first show that respondents have excessively optimistic beliefs about their own and their peers' chances of obtaining a tenure track fac-ulty position. Respondents who received the historical placement information treatment updated their beliefs about their own likelihood of obtaining a faculty position in a follow-up survey one year later, particularly those who had the most biased initial beliefs.
How-ever, we do not find an effect on the likelihood of doing a post-doc at four years post -intervention.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )