Sham Statistics

You can prove anything with statistics. I know that is not strictly behavioural economics, but it is true. Sometimes, however, attempts to prove 'anything' are a tad blatant.

As I sat through the cinema adverts before The Hobbit started last night, one advert caught my attention. It was for a men's perfume that claimed to be better than the rest (I can't remember the brand). In order to back up this claim it had a statistic along the lines of "Most men prefer our perfume!"

In small print at the bottom of the screen was displayed the following sentence:

88% of 32 men agree

Argghhh!

That is a mind-bogglingly small (and thus unreliable) sample! Leaving aside the fact that we do not know how they conducted the survey or how the selected the 32 men (for all we know they could have been employees...), a sample size of 32 is not large enough to be conclusive.

Conclusion: You can prove anything with statistics, especially if you are unscrupulous.

Addictive Blogger Statistics

Despite being well-acquainted with behavioural economics I am not immune to being influenced by it. Google Blogger, through which GuruHogg exists, provides live updates on the number of people reading GuruHogg - it is addictive! I promise that if it weren't for the live statistics I wouldn't be too bothered how many people read GuruHogg, but with live stats it is a completely different matter...

12th September

You can see which are the most popular posts. You can even see which country readers are from:

This changed my behaviour. I quickly moved from being ambivalent about readership to being addicted to the stats. A simple 'nudge' made all the difference. By constantly giving me updates about how many people read GuruHogg I became interested in increasing that number. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I actually suspect that thinking about what people read the most may have improved the posts I put up here. But I am trying to be less interested by the stats because it is not a driving motivation behind GuruHogg.

Anyway, I ramble. In conclusion, no one is immune from being nudged into different behaviour. Not even GuruHogg!