When the Effects of Informational Interventions Are Driven by Salience—Evidence from School Parents in Brazil

Do informational interventions work because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction or, to a large extent, because they increase the salience of the decision they target? We randomly assign parents to either an information group that receives text messages with weekly data on their child’s attendance and school effort or a salience group that receives messages that try to redirect their attention without child-specific information. While information has large impacts on attendance, test scores, and grade promotion relative to the control group, outcomes in the salience group improve by at least as much.