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JulianMorrison comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong
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"A slightly higher percentage"? More like: no correlation.
I recall that McDonalds were badly burned by "would you X". Would people buy salads? oh god yes, they'd love an opportunity to eat out and stick to their diets. Did they buy salads, once McDonalds had added them? Nope.
Similarly I recall that last US election the Ron Paul Blimp campaign was able to get a lot more chartable pledges than real-world money, and pretty quickly died from underfunding.
Someone[1] must be buying those salads, as McDonalds is keeping them on the market, and given that food spoils, it doesn't make financial sense for them to keep offering a product which doesn't sell.
1: I've actually tried the McDonalds salad 3 times. The first time, it was very (and surprisingly) good. The other two times it was mediocre.
You can keep small stocks of an item, and it can have positive effects beyond direct revenues, e.g. if families with one dieting or vegetarian member don't avoid McDonald's because that person can eat a salad.
I think the positive effect is that they can say that they sell salads, people can convince themselves they intend to buy the salad, and so on.
I saw a study recently that said that the mere presence of a salad on the menu increases people's consumption. I deeply doubt that fast food chains were surprised by that result.
From the nature of the study, it's not even about convincing themselves they intend to buy a salad. By merely seriously having considered the option, they give themselves virtue points which offset the vice of more consumption.
Or rather, another positive effect. These explanations aren't mutually exclusive.
That being said, nice insight.
You make an excellent point, I was not really thinking clearly there.
However, I will note that my intent was not that it should produce an accurate prediction of donations, but to better gauge public opinion on the idea to counteract the tendency to agree silently but disagree loudly.
Yes, excellent point that should be underlined for the readers here.
People's metaknowledge is very poor. Their knowledge about themselves, especially so.