LW anchoring experiment: maybe

gwern

I do an informal experiment testing whether LessWrong karma scores are susceptible to a form of anchoring based on the first comment posted; a medium-large effect size is found although the data does not fit the assumed normal distribution & the more sophisticated analysis is equivocal, so there may or may not be an anchoring effect.

Full writeup on gwern.net at http://www.gwern.net/Anchoring

I do an informal experiment testing whether LessWrong karma scores are susceptible to a form of anchoring based on the first comment posted; a medium-large effect size is found although the data does not fit the assumed normal distribution & the more sophisticated analysis is equivocal, so there may or may not be an anchoring effect.

Full writeup on gwern.net at http://www.gwern.net/Anchoring

I would really appreciate a very brief statement of your conclusions. My apologies, but I don't feel like shoveling through your analysis just to find out whether there is an effect, a weak effect, a backwards effect, or whatever.

Just skip the intro, R-code and graphs (too heavy on math).

Question 1:

Is there a difference in karma between posts that received a negative initial comment and those that received a positive initial comment? (Any difference suggests that one or both is having an effect.)

Conclusion 1:

The difference in means has shrunk but not gone away; it’s large enough that 10% of the possible effect sizes (of "a negative initial comment rather than positive") may be zero or actually be positive (increase karma) instead. This is a little concerning, but I

... (read more)

2jsalvatier13y

I was interested in the details of this, but yes, even I would have appreciated a tl:dr.

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LW anchoring experiment: maybe

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LW anchoring experiment: maybe

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