This plays too much into the dumb Republicans stereotype to be believable. "We-ell, if I'm not usin' as much 'lectricity as Jimmy down the road, I must be missin' out on the 'Murican dream!" It's hard to believe that this mentality is prevalent enough in any group to affect overall energy consumption meaningfully.

I could believe that a few people who are in the "below average use" bucket might take these reports as a confirmation that they can relax their energy conservation efforts, but I can't believe that any meaningful number of people would actively increase their usage to "catch up" to their neighbors.

Yeah well science sometimes is surprising, otherwise, why even bother to do it? I am tempted, but I'll resist for now to google for the article.

Must resist... :-/

Edit: damn it... Luckily it was the second hit http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

>>"Republicans who live in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) and had no record of giving to environmental organizations actually increased their consumption by 1 percent.

Why would some energy-conscious Republicans all of a sudden become power hogs?"

The article says that a particular demographic of republicans increased their usage by 1 percent. Then describes them as power-hogs for their 1 percent increase. Thats a bit difficult to take seriously. All the examples of change seem to have been cherry-picked to try and make an interesting article, rather than forming an interesting picture as a whole.

Thanks for the link. I have some doubts about the validity of the conclusion, though. The only Republican group that showed the increase seems quite narrow. "Registered conservative, does not pay for renewable energy, does not donate to environmental groups, and in bottom 25th percentile liberal block group". How many people are actually in that group? Maybe it's a large percentage, but I kind of doubt it. If it's only a small percentage of Republicans that fell into this bucket, then it's inappropriate to claim that the conclusions apply to Republicans as a whole.

I'm also having trouble parsing the tables in the original paper, but it appears that there are groups with a worse treatment effect (e.g. college educated with above-average use) that the authors did not highlight. Perhaps this is a misreading on my part?

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/costa/Nudgew15939.pdf

I'm not sure if the article I linked to was even the same one that I read a while ago, it was just the second thing that popped up in Google. I regard it more as a curiosity anyway.

I think it would have been better if they had made that experiment in a more neutral setting (psychology students perhaps), the aspect of the political parties is distracting. The main point is that nudges can go wrong.

That's fair enough. It's just misleading to paint in broad strokes with terms like "Republican" if the evidence supports only a narrow slice of that. It turns into spin at that point.