What an interesting paper! Thanks Seb. I also see that it was co-authored by Tobias Escher, who wrote our recently published evaluation reports. Nice work, Toby.
Here are a couple of thoughts that it provokes: 1.) It always seemed obvious to me that it was more attractive to sign a petition with a million signers, than one with 5, especially if it's about a big issue. What surprises me is that whilst the effect exists, it's so small in this experiment: "For those presented with high numbers, 66.7 per cent were signed (that is, 4.2% more than in the control group) and this result is significant (p=0.015)." People are (therefore) much less swayed by big numbers than I would have guessed. 2.) This makes me wonder what it would be like to build a petitions site that *refused to tell you how many people had signed a petition* until some period after you sign, or some fixed date. It could even incentivise you to take part by letting you be part of a sweepstake "Now you've signed, would you likes to guess how many other people will sign?" 3.) It would be nice to run this again with little issues, rather than huge big global issues. More than nice - very useful for projects like FixMyTransport... best, Tom On 27 June 2011 11:21, Seb Bacon <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > With particular relevance to ePetitions and Pledgebank, some > interesting research: that showing how many other people have signed a > petition affects the likelihood of others signing: > > http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2009/Margetts.pdf > > Seb > > _______________________________________________ > developers-public mailing list > [email protected] > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > > Unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/tom%40tomsteinberg.co.uk > _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
