Talk:Social norms approach/Archives/2011

Conflict of interest
06-Dec-2008: It was suspicious that one user-id, who edited the article (a lot in November), did not edit any other topics on Wikipedia, and did not know about the style of typical wikilinks to use in the text. It caused concern, as a potential conflict of interest, as a pet subject, not being edited as one among many various articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:58, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Notability verification
06-Dec-2008: This was another of the thousands of subjects new to me, so I quickly put a wikilink to the researchers names "H. Wesley Perkins" and Alan D. Berkowitz, plus a footnote that describes both researchers for the topic. In Dec. 2008, the Google hits=9,340 for "social norms approach" listing over 490 websites with that phrase. Also, Google indexed site "site:www.socialnorms.org" as having 231 webpages, which is a lot: many moviestars or small companies have websites below 190 pages. Even 50 webpages would be a lot for a small company. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:58, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Measuring the effectiveness
06-Dec-2008: Scientifically, testing the effectiveness (of "social norms" results) would require multiple "double-blind" clinical trials, to see if people/events improved, when even the local researchers would not be aware which method is being used with their test subjects. Note that any study which checks performance, to see if performance will improve, can expect an automatic boost in results, due to the "Hawthorne effect" of talking to subjects: raise or lower the lighting, and their work just always gets a little better. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:58, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Seems neutral now
I can't see any evidence of bias in this article. Re: Hawthorne effect. Are subjects aware that they are being studied? In additiion, the extent to which the Hawthorne effect really exists (at least now) has been questioned. Re: double blind research design. A substantial proportion of studies studies, even in medicine, use double-blind and randomly-assigned groups. That, of course, is the gold standard but valuable evidence is obtained from epidemiological and many other research designs. It appears that the effectiveness of social norms marketing may be highly variable. ~ContinuingStudiesPerson~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by ContinuingStudiesPerson (talk • contribs) 20:59, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Criticism section was added earlier
In 2008 "a section on Criticisms of the social norms approach so the article covers all sides of the issue, which will hopefully address the neutrality and conflict of interest issues." ContinuingStudiesPersonContinuingStudiesPerson (talk) 21:28, 19 October 2010 (UTC)