List Experiment Designer Agent Skill

Design and diagnose list experiments (item count technique).

Context cost
5.2k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
2 files · 20.7 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
Source-availablethe author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design and diagnose list experiments (item count technique).

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

data science
Filed under

Research

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md17.0 kB · preview
--- name: list-experiment argument-hint: "[describe your sensitive question or list experiment design]" ---
7# List Experiment Designer
8
9**Related skills:** Use alongside hypothesis-building (state π and a SESOI before design choices), survey-design (mode effects, question ordering, and pre-testing of control items), and methods-reporting (deposit list wording, randomization seed, list package version, and ict.test / ict.hausman.test / ictreg() output).
10
11## Instructions
12
13### 1. Pre-Design: Is a List Experiment Warranted?
14
15- **Assess sensitivity bias first:** Before committing to a list experiment, consult domain-specific evidence on sensitivity bias. Blair, Coppock, and Moor's (2020) meta-analysis of 30 years of list experiments shows that sensitivity biases are typically smaller than 10 percentage points. A list experiment is not automatically the right choice for any sensitive topic.
16- **Social reference theory:** Sensitivity bias is largest when (a) the social norm on the topic is strong, (b) the norm is clear and widely shared, and (c) respondents believe others can infer their true attitude from their response (Blair et al. 2020). Evaluate all three conditions before deciding.
17- **Precision cost:** List experiments require approximately 10 times more respondents than a direct question to achieve equivalent precision. The trade-off is only favorable when the expected sensitivity bias exceeds the precision loss (Blair et al. 2020). If the topic is sensitive but the expected bias is small (< 5pp), a direct question with neutral framing is often preferable.
18- **Empirical benchmarks by domain:** Voter turnout (~5–15pp overreport, wide confidence intervals), clientelism and vote-buying (~5–15pp underreport), racial prejudice (near-zero sensitivity bias — Blair et al. 2020 find little evidence respondents conceal prejudice on direct questions), authoritarian regime support (highly context-dependent and often dominated by artificial deflation rather than preference falsification). Use these as priors when no domain-specific estimates exist.
19
20### 2. Basic Design
21
22- **Core logic:** Assign respondents randomly to a control group (receives N baseline items) or a treatment group (receives N+1 items, including the sensitive item). Estimate prevalence as the difference in mean counts between treatment and control. This provides plausible deniability because no individual response can be traced to the sensitive item.
23- **Number of control items:** Use 3–5 control items. Fewer items reduce plausible deniability (too easy to infer the sensitive item from a high count). More items increase cognitive load and floor/ceiling risk, and reduce statistical efficiency.
24- **Randomize item order:** Randomize the order of all items within each respondent's list to prevent position effects from inflating or deflating specific items.
25- **Wording parity:** Frame all items, including the sensitive item, in the same grammatical form and at the same abstraction level. Stylistic inconsistency makes the sensitive item stand out, undermining the design.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,424 words
Files2
LicenceSource-available
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈50
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,125
on trigger
The instruction body and 1 supporting file, read only when the skill fires.
2.6%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 26% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

5.2k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

2 files, 20.7 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md17.0 kB
  • reference/example-clientelism.md3.7 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 2 files you can review in full before installing. The Source-available licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# List Experiment Designer · 5.2k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/list-experiment-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/list-experiment-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/list-experiment-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/list-experiment-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/list-experiment-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/list-experiment-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add brycewang-stanford/list-experiment-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/list-experiment-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/list-experiment-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/list-experiment-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/list-experiment-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/list-experiment-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/list-experiment-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/list-experiment-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/list-experiment-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as list-experiment in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, list-experiment-designer.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencebrycewang-stanford/list-experiment-designer

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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