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.
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.