A little lesson from Wikipedia.
(Note: fear not. The second installment in the hypertext series is coming along. It’s long.)
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There’s a psychology concept called “social proof.” Wikipedia Roughly, it means that people are more likely to do X if they know other people are doing X, even if that’s irrational.
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It and other cognitive biases, Wikipedia became quite an intellectual fad this century as Kahnemann and Tversky’s “Heuristics and biases” “The Many Schools of the Great Rationality Debate”, Jared Peterson. research programme made it into the business-books-section-of-the-airport-bookstore.
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Wikimedia sometimes puts fundraising blurbs on their pages. They invariably point out how few people donate: “… fewer than 1% of readers give.”
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This is the opposite of what social proof would predict. Many, many people have apparently pointed this out to the Wikimedia people, who note “The online fundraising team has tested, dozens of times, removing this fact from our materials. Our donation rate drops when we try.” Wikimedia 2018/2019 fundraising report
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The amusing thing is how many people felt the need to correct the fundraisers based on what they’d read of a generalization based on tests done on undergraduates in highly artificial conditions.
Note: I closed the tab that inspired this post, and have forgotten who deserves credit. Maybe Jared Bernstein?