Consider the analogous hypotheses about attractive real estate brokers, which are in higher demand. You might claim that broker attractiveness is just an indicator of broker quality. One hypothesis says attractive brokers are in more demand mostly because they sell houses faster, while another hypothesis says the are in more demand mostly because people like to hang out with attractive people. We could compare these theories empirically by seeing if in fact attractive brokers sell houses faster or for more money. If they don’t, or if their gains aren’t enough to cover their added costs, the second hypothesis would be favored.
The second hypothesis would not be favored, even if the data turned out to be so.
As far as I know, nobody has done such tests, or at least no such test is in public knowledge. So obviously it couldn’t have been incorporated in prestige yet.
When averaged over all human activities, it’s not too hard to see that physically attractive people perform somewhat better. Incorporating it as part of default prestige mix makes sense when we don’t know anything about real estate brokers.
If we suddenly came out with super-precise quality metrics for some field, it would turn out that prestige overestimates performance of some and underestimates performance of others. We just don’t have any idea what would the adjustment be.
One could look if it made any difference, but the reason for what they see might not be obvious to understand. The obvious expected change would be an increase of the quality metrics and a decrease of the (previous) prestige metrics in correlation of which service customers buy. (In principle, this is calculable.)
In practice, I’d expect the effects would be lower than “rational”, at least at first. Such a precise quality metric is likely to be complicated to obtain (since we don’t have one yet). People would naturally be mistrustful of it; in effect, unless one can do the entire analysis again and re-derive the new metric themselves, one must balance the previous prestige measure with the prestige of the researcher(s) that introduced the new metric. (In fact, even if I could re-derive the metric myself, I wouldn’t apply 100% confidence to my calculations. In all psychological studies thatIread researchers seemed to assume that the rational action would be to apply 100% confidence to new information, with the exception of studies about confidence...)
The effect might be even reversed, in the case of more-or-less paranoid customers suspecting a conspiracy.
Assuming it wasn’t incorporated in the prestige metrics already or too insignificant to bothered with, yes. Prediction is that new customers would change their behaviour in this direction.
Consider the analogous hypotheses about attractive real estate brokers, which are in higher demand. You might claim that broker attractiveness is just an indicator of broker quality. One hypothesis says attractive brokers are in more demand mostly because they sell houses faster, while another hypothesis says the are in more demand mostly because people like to hang out with attractive people. We could compare these theories empirically by seeing if in fact attractive brokers sell houses faster or for more money. If they don’t, or if their gains aren’t enough to cover their added costs, the second hypothesis would be favored.
The second hypothesis would not be favored, even if the data turned out to be so.
As far as I know, nobody has done such tests, or at least no such test is in public knowledge. So obviously it couldn’t have been incorporated in prestige yet.
When averaged over all human activities, it’s not too hard to see that physically attractive people perform somewhat better. Incorporating it as part of default prestige mix makes sense when we don’t know anything about real estate brokers.
If we suddenly came out with super-precise quality metrics for some field, it would turn out that prestige overestimates performance of some and underestimates performance of others. We just don’t have any idea what would the adjustment be.
Well by your standards once one had collected such data one could see if it made any difference to new customers, when they were informed of it.
One could look if it made any difference, but the reason for what they see might not be obvious to understand. The obvious expected change would be an increase of the quality metrics and a decrease of the (previous) prestige metrics in correlation of which service customers buy. (In principle, this is calculable.)
In practice, I’d expect the effects would be lower than “rational”, at least at first. Such a precise quality metric is likely to be complicated to obtain (since we don’t have one yet). People would naturally be mistrustful of it; in effect, unless one can do the entire analysis again and re-derive the new metric themselves, one must balance the previous prestige measure with the prestige of the researcher(s) that introduced the new metric. (In fact, even if I could re-derive the metric myself, I wouldn’t apply 100% confidence to my calculations. In all psychological studies that I read researchers seemed to assume that the rational action would be to apply 100% confidence to new information, with the exception of studies about confidence...)
The effect might be even reversed, in the case of more-or-less paranoid customers suspecting a conspiracy.
Assuming it wasn’t incorporated in the prestige metrics already or too insignificant to bothered with, yes. Prediction is that new customers would change their behaviour in this direction.
Good test. Has someone done it?
Good test. Does anyone here has a house to sell?
Good test. Does anyone have a bunch of grad students to go and rate real estate brokers and compare with existing sales data?