X-Message-Number: 30344
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: "Fountain of youth" continues to beckon
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:42:31 +0100

I am not sure the details below are right, but I might not be able to  
get back to this for months.

dss



I repeated the analysis of the cleaned and and transformed data from  
Frozen Dead Guy Days (2007) with only the attitude questions, using  
them to predict motivation ("looking in to it"). The only significant  
predictors were "young again" and "will not work".  "Waking up in a  
body made young" is motivating to people and people are not motivated  
if they believe cryonics will not work. The question about friends  
tended to influence motivation.

The tendency is that concern about friends/family yields lower  
motivation (p<.8). Agreement with "I'm excited about the prospect of  
waking up in a body made young again" leads to higher motivation (p<. 
0001). While not thinking cryonics will work leads to lower motivation  
(p<.0001).

These findings are not surprising. However, they do emphasize that a  
collective solution, which reduces concern about waking up "without my  
family or friends" could increase motivation. It suggests that lower  
prices for family members could be a motivating factor for individual  
memberships.


We can also use the  motivation question as the predictor. That is, if  
we know the motivation is higher, can we predict anything about  
attitudes?

Agreement with "no guarantee" is significantly lower among the  
"strongly disagree" compared to the "disagree" motivation. Those that  
only disagree that cryonics is the only option for survival are a lot  
more likely to be motivated to look further into cryonics. (If we  
subtract disagree from strongly disagree we get a positive result,  
which means less motivation.)

Agreement with "accomplish more" is significantly lower among the  
"disagree" as compared to "neutral" motivation. (If we subtract  
neutral from disagree we get a positive result, which means less  
motivation.)

While optimism about the future is significantly related to  
motivation, there is only a trend toward that resulting from the  
"disagree" as compared to "neutral" motivations.

We get the same result for "no loss due to ageing".

The highly significant effect for "young again" is also due to the   
"disagree" as compared to "neutral" motivations (p< .0025).

The same is true for "will not work".

"too young" is significant. Agreement leads to lower motivation. (If  
we subtract  agree from neutral we get a negative result, which means  
more motivation.)


Thus, for our most significant predictors of motivation, the  
difference between neutral and disagree produces most of the effect.   
This suggests that the prospect of being made young again has a big  
effect when people see any possibility at all of it happening.

In the second case, "will not work," significant change in motivation  
may be due to the fact that a majority of responses were on those  
options. Most people responded neutral. Once they disagreed at all  
that the possibility exists, motivation dropped.

There is known to be an inflection in the utility curve around zero.  
Slightly positive payoffs are not very effective. However, slightly  
negative payoffs tend to produce disproportionate effects. This is  
probably what is causing motivation to change when there is this shift  
from "neutral" to "disagree". That is, the potential payoff changes  
significantly, from a psychological point of view.

The motivation, as indicated by action, was very low. Only 4 of 85  
people requested literature be sent from an organization.


dss

David Stodolsky    Skype: davidstodolsky

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