Blogging as Accountability

Sent in from reader Hal Emmer:

I think another example, at least for some people, is blogging.  Even if you don't have much of an audience, the idea that people are out there who are waiting for you to do something is enough to get some people to do it.  I think "show and tell" blogs are the best examples of this - I am willing to bet that people who write about their cooking cook more (and more interesting stuff) than they otherwise would.

He's no doubt correct. This reminded me of a friend who blogs about the U Street neighborhood in DC. I can't speak for her, but she's probably seen more of the neighborhood than she otherwise would have, in order to generate blog material. In that same spirit, my fiancee and I hope our wedding blog will inspire us to keep hammering out all the details required to plan a wedding.

Hal's example also made me of think the ABC "Primetime" segment in 2005 that promised to show unflattering bikini photos of participants on the air if they didn't drop lose 15 pounds in 2 months. You can read more about the segment here, which I first learned about from the excellent game theory book "The Art of Strategy." As the book recounts, one participant narrowly missed the cutoff and basically threatened to sue ABC, which subsequently backed off. So ABC's threat wasn't so credible after all.

The examples in this post involve exposing yourself to peer pressure or the threat of public humiliation to inspire yourself to accomplish something. My previous posts, on enrolling in school and buying a Wii Fit, focused on committing money to something in order to guilt yourself into following through with it.

Feel free to send me more ideas if you have them.

Wii Fit as Accountability

In the same vein as what I wrote about yesterday:

My fiancee recently got herself a Wii Fit. I awoke (rather tardy) this morning to find her doing step aerobics.

Sharon: "I usually just switch it over to regular TV while I'm doing this."
Me: "Couldn't you have just done that without the Wii?"
Sharon: "Yeah, but I'd usually just be sitting there like you (sprawled lazily on the couch)."

The Wii remote has a built-in speaker, so the game can coach you along even if you've switched the TV to a different channel. The combination of hearing the remote's encouragement, knowing that the game is tracking your progress, and knowing that you would feel guilty if you spent money on the Wii Fit and never used it is enough to compel people to exercise instead of just sitting around.

Perhaps I'll write a longer series about this concept. If you have any ideas, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment.

Education as Accountability

Economists have modeled education as serving no purpose besides providing graduates a credible signal of their intellectual ability. Some employers have trouble assessing the quality of potential workers, but at least they can deduce something about the candidates based on their ability to get into and graduate from top schools, even if academic success is not perfectly correlated with workplace success. It doesn't matter what the students actually learned, as long as they had the follow-through to graduate. The most famous paper on this topic is Michael Spence's "Job Market Signaling," published in 1973.

Another function of education is accountability. As one professor pointed out to our class last year, we could have all found the syllabus online and read all of the course's books ourselves, so what's the point of doing it in a classroom setting? By enrolling in school (especially if you're paying your own way), you're setting up a situation with bad outcomes if you don't succeed. Whenever you hit a rough patch in the material, these consequences motive you to get through it, whereas otherwise you might have given up, if you were just learning on your own. And if we concede that being around a teacher and fellow students really does help you learn, this increasing your chances of success ever further.

I recently started taking a course in linear algebra (not at George Mason). The professor does nothing more than walk us through the textbook, page by page and sometimes word for word. He has other annoying habits, such as writing whole paragraphs on the white board or telling us about how he keeps getting fired. My classmates complain about his teaching methods, and he's definitely one of the worst teachers I've ever had. But if nothing else, I'm going through the textbook to answer his homework questions (or rather, the textbook author's homework questions), something I would have had a hard time motivating myself to do if I had just bought the textbook and put it on my coffee table, promising myself that I would get around to studying it someday.