Until today, there has been an email sitting in my inbox with a google form asking me to vote on a bid day theme for my sorority. The google form takes approximately 45 seconds to fill out, and yet for a week it sat there unopened. One might think I was simply a lazy bum, but after reading Johnson I realize that I was completely rational in this decision. You see, my marginal benefit of one “candidate” (theme) winning over the other is essentially 0, maybe 0.000001 if I had to put a number on it. I would not pay any amount of money to guarantee one outcome over another. That being said, even with the electronic format of the ballot, the cost to me to vote is still above zero, because it will cost my time and attention for approximately 1 minute, which is worth about 16 cents if I value my time at say $10 an hour. Even without multiplying my marginal benefit by the odds that my vote determines the outcome, for which the lower bound is 0.0067 (1/150 members of my sorority), it still wouldn’t be rational to take the time to vote.
Today though, I finally filled out the google form, and you want to know why? The social pressure hypothesis. I ran into a girl from my pledge class on the corner, and she asked me what I voted for on the bid day form, and I felt ashamed admitting that I hadn’t filled it out, so I went on google forms right there and completed it! Even though I finally voted due to social pressure, I didn’t take the time to look at the attached slides and inform myself about each of the choices, I just picked one that sounded good- to be completely honest I don’t even remember which one. Yet again, I aligned with the model from Johnson, I was rationally ignorant. Thank goodness we read Johnson this week, or I would have just considered myself lazy!
No comments:
Post a Comment