It also bears noting that humans are social creatures: even ignoring acausal considerations, you getting out to vote will increase the probability that people who know you will also get out to vote. E.g. researchers in one study visited two-person households and encouraged them to go out and vote. Afterwards, it was shown that the people the researchers talked to were 10 percent more likely to go out and vote (as compared to people in a control group who were encouraged to recycle, IIRC). But the other person in the household, who had not been spoken to, was also 6 percent more likely to vote.
In general, influence in social networks obeys the three step rule: what you are and what you do influences your friends, the friends of your friends, and the friends of your friends’ friends. (This applies not just to voting, but also things such as happiness, suicides and obesity.) Computer simulations suggest that you going out to vote will on average encourage three others to vote as well. Because people tend to befriend people with similar values, those extra votes are more likely to benefit your preferred candidate than opposing ones: of the three extra votes, an average of two will vote the same way you did. While three (two) is the average, depending on the structure of the social network and your position on it, you might cause as many as a hundred other people to go out and vote.
Obviously, to maximize this effect, you’ll want to make sure as many of your friends as possible know that you voted and who you voted for.
But of course these outside view considerations don’t matter if you know that, causally, no one’s going to be affected by your decision to vote or not. And I haven’t done a rigorous analysis but the acausal consequences seem rather minimal.
I’m not sure I follow you. Research indicates that your decision to vote does affect the decision of others (unless you’re a complete hermit, I suppose). Note that I’m not talking about acausal effects here.
The research is great for calculations based on the outside view. It holds for people in general. But if I know that none of my friends care or could verify whether or not I voted, that screens off the outside view considerations. Take me, for instance. Unless I go post about it on Facebook, I’m not going to cause any of my friends to vote or not. I don’t talk about such things. Maybe if my nature was sufficiently transparent they could infer my tendency to vote or not vote, but I’m not that transparent. So what causal process is stemming from my vote decision to theirs? In general, people yammer on about their voting decisions, but those trends don’t apply to people like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if my decision was correlated with the decisions of others, but I don’t see causation, and so my action is only consequential via acausal means.
It also bears noting that humans are social creatures: even ignoring acausal considerations, you getting out to vote will increase the probability that people who know you will also get out to vote. E.g. researchers in one study visited two-person households and encouraged them to go out and vote. Afterwards, it was shown that the people the researchers talked to were 10 percent more likely to go out and vote (as compared to people in a control group who were encouraged to recycle, IIRC). But the other person in the household, who had not been spoken to, was also 6 percent more likely to vote.
In general, influence in social networks obeys the three step rule: what you are and what you do influences your friends, the friends of your friends, and the friends of your friends’ friends. (This applies not just to voting, but also things such as happiness, suicides and obesity.) Computer simulations suggest that you going out to vote will on average encourage three others to vote as well. Because people tend to befriend people with similar values, those extra votes are more likely to benefit your preferred candidate than opposing ones: of the three extra votes, an average of two will vote the same way you did. While three (two) is the average, depending on the structure of the social network and your position on it, you might cause as many as a hundred other people to go out and vote.
Obviously, to maximize this effect, you’ll want to make sure as many of your friends as possible know that you voted and who you voted for.
Reference: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
But of course these outside view considerations don’t matter if you know that, causally, no one’s going to be affected by your decision to vote or not. And I haven’t done a rigorous analysis but the acausal consequences seem rather minimal.
I’m not sure I follow you. Research indicates that your decision to vote does affect the decision of others (unless you’re a complete hermit, I suppose). Note that I’m not talking about acausal effects here.
The research is great for calculations based on the outside view. It holds for people in general. But if I know that none of my friends care or could verify whether or not I voted, that screens off the outside view considerations. Take me, for instance. Unless I go post about it on Facebook, I’m not going to cause any of my friends to vote or not. I don’t talk about such things. Maybe if my nature was sufficiently transparent they could infer my tendency to vote or not vote, but I’m not that transparent. So what causal process is stemming from my vote decision to theirs? In general, people yammer on about their voting decisions, but those trends don’t apply to people like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if my decision was correlated with the decisions of others, but I don’t see causation, and so my action is only consequential via acausal means.
Right. So assuming you do care about the outcome of the vote, you should modify your behavior so that you do e.g. post about it on Facebook.
Or just post about it on Facebook without doing it, and thus get all but 1 vote of the benefit with almost none of the cost.