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'm not sure to what extent these comments can be modeled as expressing a "positive" or a "negative" reaction, the nonsensical one-line explanations made them mostly "insane" reactions (in my perception), which might overshadow the intended interpretation. It might have been a cleaner test if there were no explanations, or if you made an effort to carefully rationalize the random judgments (although that would be a more significant interference).

It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" sort of dilemma.

I know from watching them plummet into oblivion that comments which are just "Upvoted" or "Downvoted" are not a good idea for any anchoring question - they'll quickly be hidden, so any effect size will be a lot smaller than usual, and it's possible that hidden comments themselves anchor (my guess: negatively, by making people think "why is this attracting stupid comments?').

While if you go with more carefully rationalized comments, that's sort of like http://x... (read more)

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LW anchoring experiment: maybe

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LW anchoring experiment: maybe

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