Good thing voters are incentivized to vote correctly like they were incentivized to answer correctly in this survey. Oh, wait.
Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
31–40 of 173 posts
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Voting theory models rational actors, not actual people. Interestingly, fontback's hypothesis is exactly how they modeled the choice, with a financial incentive plus some "psychological incentive"
"there is no incentive or a very small incentive to choose the candidate with the best policies, because the chance of your vote making a difference is so small" is a theoretical argument about rational actors, not an observation about actual people. The paper I linked argues that it doesn't hold. It also argues that there's some real-world evidence that people vote for social reasons.
Regardless of how a person votes, they're voting for a feel-good reason.
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in voting for the candidate that rationally maximizes the Good, for some subjective measure of the good. These are the 'social preferences' Gellman talks about.
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in the tribe, and they want to vote for the people like them and around them to fit in, especially so they won't be confused with the Enemy.
Pretty much everyone has both tendencies, which are inherently in tension. This is cognitive dissonance. People don't like experiencing this, so they end up choosing to believe both in tribal politics and that their tribe is the rational one, which is the most convenient way to cut that Gordian knot.
Now, we can debate which tribe is more rational. I think currently in the USA the blue tribe has more people motivated by the desire to be seen as rational. Then again, we'd also predict that's what everyone thinks. So probably that debate wouldn't be productive.
This experiment is useful because it tells us that money is a very useful way to cut through the bullshit of tribal beliefs. It also might give us hints as to how to design our electoral system to tend toward more rational options.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively: If I'm getting paid for factually-correct answers, I'm less likely to throw away money by using my answers as an opportunity to signal my ideology.
If your ideology is at odds with factual correctness... maybe you should rethink your ideology?
Humans as a whole have a revealed preference for tribal cohesion over accepting reality.
It was probably a beneficial trait when the Dunbar number roughly matched the number of people with in a day's communication.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#34The small payments ranged between 17 cents and $1. But how the payment calculations were described, based on weirdly complicated raffle entry odds for gift certificates or with different questions randomly worth 25 cents or 50 cents or whatever with various probabilities. Frankly, I doubt most participants understood the payments guidance about what amount correct answers would earn them. This could imply just puttin…
Could also be a version of the Hawthorne effect. [1]
In this particular case the money was a proxy which was more powerful than words meant to say 'your answer is important' or 'your vote counts'. It's actually hard for me to put in words this concept but intuitively it is what seems is happening.
Ok so let's take as an example upvote/downvotes on HN. Many of us give little thought to the impact and do it impulsively at least in some cases. Now let's pretend we know there is an impact, even minor, financially. We will pay more attention and I feel at least be more likely to carefully consider voting in either direction.
Remember with money also people tend to not want to be wasteful it doesn't feel good. Nobody takes even pennies and throws them in the trashcan.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. If a person truly believed a bullshit answer was true they'd pick it over I don't know. The experiment shows that given an incentive to not think in partisan talking points, people will admit they know that what they would normal espouse as truth is, in fact,bullshit.
Or, given an incentive people will answer with what they believe the other person wants.
Presuming the subjects truly believed their first-choice answers were factual, then why would they be under the impression the researchers want to hear something else?
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#36"The experiments show that small payments for correct and "don't know" responses sharply diminish the gap between Democrats and Republicans in responses to "partisan" factual question"
This study fails to impress me as anyone with some intelligence would always pick "don't know" since it's a guaranteed payment.
I'm not impressed by things I don't read, either.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#37Interesting finding. One of the problems with voting is that there is no incentive or a very small incentive to choose the candidate with the best policies, because the chance of your vote making a difference is so small. Therefore people vote for a candidate that makes them feel good, rather than a competent one. This is arguably the cause of many bad policies. Caplan discusses this issue in his book 'The Myth of th…
> ...because the chance of your vote making a difference is so small.
...in national elections. Federal systems are designed with this in mind. In recent decades, more and more issues have become national issues, which erodes the influence of the individual voter. And, on top of that, if the power of the vote is ineffective, you can always move in a federal system. So the erosion of choice is compounded.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rati... This paper argues that voting for social reasons ("this result will benefit society") is sensible even in large elections. The value depends on the percent turnout, but not on population size.
Voting theory models rational actors, not actual people. Interestingly, fontback's hypothesis is exactly how they modeled the choice, with a financial incentive plus some "psychological incentive"
But when two sides are acting from different facts, different understandings of the world, both can reach different conclusions while still being rational.
If you truly believe that one candidate is a lizard-person, the rational thing is to vote against them. When everyone you know and trust also believes in lizard-people, and you are unable to test for yourself, the rational person also believes. The answer to the problem is accuracy in facts, a wider dissemination of reality. The rest will follow.
Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#39Interesting finding. One of the problems with voting is that there is no incentive or a very small incentive to choose the candidate with the best policies, because the chance of your vote making a difference is so small. Therefore people vote for a candidate that makes them feel good, rather than a competent one. This is arguably the cause of many bad policies. Caplan discusses this issue in his book 'The Myth of th…
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Re: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
#40So I guess this moves the mindset from "argument" towards "truth finding". Assuming that's true, how could we use that effect for, say, good?
Reducing the tendency of people to lie on survey polls is an obvious applications. You could ask people to predict how popular a candidate is, with a payoff tied to prediction accuracy.