X-Message-Number: 30448
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: What makes people take action?
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:56:58 +0100

After log transforming all attitude and disposition items plus the  
action item from the Badger (1998) data in order to achieve better  
distributional characteristics, I again attempt to identify the  
critical items.

First a jackknife outlier analysis is used to remove 94 persons from  
the data set. Then we perform an ordinal logistic analysis and  
identify the following significant predictors of the action item, "I  
believe that Cryonics is an exciting idea and intend on looking into  
it further.":

young again *
will not work *
too costly
too selfish *
love life
under no circumstances *

* p<.01

We conclude that any of the above items can predict whether a person  
will indicate intention to act.


A stepwise regression selects the following as predictors (in entry  
order, which tends to indicate strength of influence):

under no circumstances *
young again *
will not work *
dog revived *
no revival *
too costly
too young
(the below are not significant at p<.05, together they raise RSquare  
from about .47 to about .49, that is not much)
million signups
too selfish
love life
optimistic future
about death
human revived

 From this we conclude that when the effects of three of the most  
significant items from the first analysis are taken into account the  
effect of "dog revived" becomes highly significant, as does the effect  
of "no revival". Also, "too young"  becomes significant, when earlier  
selected items are taken into account (see the earlier post for  
discussion of these effects).



Since our results are again dominated by "under no circumstances",  
that is, outright rejection of cryonics (that one item accounts for a  
majority of the the effect - RSquare=.3), we try to predict what  
causes this response with  an ordinal logistic fit (effects Wald  
tests) (+ indicates a positive relationship):

+ will not work *
+ too complicated
+ too selfish *
- human revived *
- cheaper *
- only chance
- no loss due to ageing
- young again

Those who agree more that their attitude toward suspension would  
change "under no circumstances" agree more that cryonics "will not  
work". The relationship is dominated by those who respond neutral and  
disagree to "under no circumstances" and correspondingly neutral and  
disagree to "will not work". The same pattern appears with "too  
selfish". We see this pattern reflected in the case of "human  
revived", but the responses are dominated by those indicating disagree  
to "under no circumstances" and agree to "human revived". The pattern  
for "cheaper" is in the same direction but with those indicating  
neutral to "under no circumstances" also responding neutral to  
"cheaper". In all cases, the responses cluster around neutral and  
disagree to "under no circumstances". The response neutral appears to  
be overused.

Those indicating disagree, that is, that they would change their  
attitude toward suspension, are more likely to say it would change, if  
a human were revived and if suspension was cheaper. On a less  
significant level they tended to agree it would be nice to avoid  
losses due to ageing of family/friends, to be young again, and that  
cryonics is their only chance.

Those indicating disagree, that is, that they would change their  
attitude toward suspension, are less likely to say that cryonics "will  
not work", that it is "too complicated", and that it is "too selfish".

Keep in mind that this last test concerns only the possibility of  
changing ones attitude, not the intention to actively seek information  
that could be useful in changing ones attitude.



If we select all those indicating disagree to "under no  
circumstances", that is, those that would change their attitude toward  
suspension, an ordinal logistic fit predicting action, "I believe that  
Cryonics is an exciting idea and intend on looking into it further."  
shows significant:

young again *
will not work *
love life *

People willing to change their attitude indicated that the were more  
likely to seek information, if they agreed more that "I'm excited  
about the prospect of waking up in a body made young again through bio- 
technological advances.", "I love being alive and I want to remain  
alive and healthy for as long as I can.", and agreed less with,  
"Cryonics doesn't interest me because I just don't think it will work."

A stepwise regression selects the following, in order of entry:

young again *
will not work *
human revived *
too weird *
love life
optimistic future *
(those below are not individually significant and only raise the  
RSquare from .33 to .34)
about death
thousand signups
no revival
without friends

"I'm excited about the prospect of waking up in a body made young  
again through bio-technological advances." is the runaway best seller  
accounting for half of the effect (RSquare = .17). "Cryonics doesn't  
interest me because I just don't think it will work." boosts the  
RSquare to .23 and from there on the effect of items goes down fast.

Previously, I suggested that more religious persons would be difficult  
to reach, even if they were willing to change their attitude. Here we  
have support for this conclusion. Even when we include only those who  
claim they are willing to change their attitude, the strongest  
negative effect is due to, "Cryonics doesn't interest me because I  
just don't think it will work." In other words, these people will not  
seek information about cryonics, because they don't think it will  
work. The problem is that they are willing to change their attitude,  
but they never will seek information that could make them change their  
attitude. So, getting these people to signup would require an  
educational effort directed toward the entire population or at least  
the most likely demographic, which still would mean a large segment of  
the population. The alternative would be to repackage bio-stasis so  
that it comes with other benefits, that would promote information  
seeking or reeducation. This appears to be the most economical and  
self-sufficient approach given the resources available to the cryonics  
movement at this time.



The transformation of the variables has improved the stability of the  
results, however, we can still see differences between, for example,  
what items are significant with an ordinal logistic, which is not  
dependent upon the distribution of the action item and the stepwise  
regression that is (However, this alone could be due to the increased  
power of a parametric test, etc.). So, a statistics package that can  
overcome the limitations of the data would be an improvement.  
Therefore, we will still have to treat all but the major findings  
above as provisional.


dss

David Stodolsky    Skype: davidstodolsky

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30448