A Comment on "The formality effect"

In this comment, we computationally reproduce the results of Linos et al. (2024), which shows contrary to researcher and practitioner predictions, that formal government communications are more effective at influencing resident behavior than informal government communications. We succeeded in reproducing the main findings and extended the analysis by exploring the heterogeneity of the results in terms of age, education and gender. Overall, the main results of the paper appear in the selected subsets of the sample, but some heterogeneity emerges. For instance, males are less likely (than females) to perceive formal letters as formal, but the effect of formality on the likelihood of acting is also higher than for females.