Join us for a talk with Kate Orkin, Clare Hall, and discussant Dr Claudia Abreu Lopes, CGHR, on Kate’s new paper. This paper reports on a field experiment to test a hypothesis in rural Ethiopia: why poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high, on account of their low aspirations and mental modes of their future opportunities which ignore some options for investment. Individuals were randomly invited to watch documentaries about people from similar communities who had succeeded in agriculture or business, without help from government or NGOs. A placebo group watched an Ethiopian entertainment programme and a control group were simply surveyed. In addition, the number of people invited was varied by village to assess the importance of peer effects in formation of aspirations. Six months after screening, aspirations had improved among treated individuals and did not change in the placebo or control groups. Treatment effects were larger for those with higher pre-treatment aspirations. The result that a one-hour documentary shown six months earlier induces actual behavioural change suggests a challenging, promising avenue for further research and poverty-related interventions.