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rhollerith_dot_com comments on An Anchoring Experiment - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (83)
My coinflip put me in group II, but since I was reading /comments/ I saw one of the anchors intended for group I, so I decided that for me to continue would bias the results.
In addition I was primed (anchored? terminology?) by the answer of another subject in group II, and this time the problem could not be blamed on my having been reading /comments/.
Nice try, but I doubt the method of collecting responses you have chosen captures the aspects of reality you wish to investigate. Maybe you could redo the collection of responses by having respondents email their responses. (ADDED: rot13ing the response like muflax did works too.) If you do redo the collection of responses, I humbly suggest that you hide the instructions given to group I from group II -- e.g. by putting them behind a hyperlink to another page.
Thanks for feedback. I know that it is difficult to avoid seeing the comments of others. The problem with e-mail is that it is marginally less convenient to do, and I was afraid that people would have not enough motivation to respond.
As for hiding the instructions, I don't see a strong reason. I suppose priming is a strong enough effect to persist even if people know they are being tested for it.
If the coin flip puts me in group II, does not my inadvertently seeing the question intended for group I (e.g., "Is the population of the Central African Republic lower or greater than 20 million?") de facto reassign me to group I? In other words, after I had been exposed to the anchor (20 million) would not my continued participation in the control group have undermined the purpose of the control group?
ADDED.
I tend to agree, but that's not it.
Agreed. It would have been better to always answer the group-II question first, whichever one you were assigned to. (That is, switch the part 1 group II question with the part 2 group I question.)
I have misunderstood you and thought you suggest that I hide parts of the original post.
I have expected that people follow on the links in the bottom of the post. If you click on the group II question link, you don't see the group I question. Of course, if you scroll down, you will see it, but therefore I have warned against reading the comments.
As a positive data point, the instructions worked for me, and I think this is an interesting and well thought-out experiment - the method isn't perfectly watertight, but that has to be balanced against making it easy and attractive for people to participate, as well as against the cost (in your time and energy) of setting it up. I think you struck a good balance.