[LINK] High school students coerced into non-optimal philanthropy via psychological warfare

Dallas

[LINK] High school students coerced into non-optimal philanthropy via psychological warfare — LessWrong

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[anonymous]15y220

seniors Charlotte Runzel and Jesse Chatz persuaded administrators to let them blast Bieber’s hit “Baby” over the school’s loudspeaker system at the end of each class period — and not stop playing the song until Runzel and Chatz had met their goal.

I think the real motivator that Runzel and Chatz provided is the opportunity for students to signal their dislike of Justin Beiber by donating. The idea that students were giving because of the disutility of listening to the song is just a front. That is, students donated so that they could say, "Yeah I donated so we can stop listening to this awful music," not because they were so fed up with hearing the song that they were willing to pay to stop it. I wonder whether Runzel and Chatz are aware of this.

FiftyTwo15y50

Interestingly a similar system was reported on reddit (though I can't find the link now), where the standard tip jar was replaced with two containers labelled after different cartoons (think it was animaniacs and dexters labratory?) and the jar that got the highest amount of donations the previous day was displayed ("You picked band X over ban Y"). This profits both from signalling desires as in the Beiber case and competiveness.

Edit: Found it!

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Discussion

The success of this is even harder to explain in terms of rewards, as they're not notio... (read more)

10Zetetic15y

I'm not sure, at the very least this could be inverted - they caused a situation where many groups of students would tend to pressure each other to donate in order to avoid the negative utility that would come from acting against their peer group. If every student is signaling their dislike by donating, donating becomes the status quo. In that case, donating wouldn't be a status raising action, but not signaling would deviate from the status quo, which is perceived as high risk so you're willing to pay to avoid that. In the end, everyone but the groups for which the signaling is status neutral is at a net loss.

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