For a Bit of Colored Ribbon

Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by dpark on Monday November 26, 2012 @12:18PM (#4832842)

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

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Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by Tichy on Monday November 26, 2012 @06:02PM (#4834509)

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.

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Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by dpark on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:20AM (#4837194)

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.

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