Images, #NYCMayor, and some paired comparison theory
In today’s newsletter, I write about supporting images in decisions, a way to help make sense of your ranked choice ballot in the New York City Mayor’s Race, and using Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment to better understand how people process decision making (that last one was a mouthful but I promise it’s interesting)
First, we shipped a fun new feature that supports embedding Imgur images in new decisions, which should help designers, photographers, artists, and other creative professionals get more effective input from their communities. We tested this feature with one such creative, my very talented stepdad, on some photos he took of wild horses on a recent trip to Wyoming. Tim prints and sells his photos on canvas, so it’s important to him to know which photos connect best before he decides which to print. Help Tim out and try out this new feature by contributing to this decision. To use this feature, all you have to do is paste a direct link to an image hosted on Imgur into the option name field (right click any image and select “Copy Image Address”).
Second, the New York City mayoral primary is next week, which will be using ranked-choice voting for the first time in the city’s history. My cofounder Andrew put together a decision to help New Yorkers craft their ballot in about five minutes -- if you’re a New Yorker, please give it a try and/or send to friends and family who might benefit.
Finally, we’ve had a few questions lately about the science behind binary-choice/paired comparison survey research, and I thought it would be fun to dive into its origin. Many people have looked at ranked-pair data. One such person was psychologist Louis Thurstone. In the 1920’s, Thurstone was studying how people rated the severity of crime and found that, while people had difficulty providing objective measurements for the severity of different crimes, they were able to easily compare them against one another. You can probably replicate this finding in your own brain -- if I asked you to describe how “bad” kidnapping is, you might struggle without the option to compare it to murder (which seems worse), and forgery (which doesn’t seem quite as bad).
Thurstone’s work, which he formalized in his Law of Comparative Judgment, has been used to inform a whole host of applications, including the use of “adaptive comparative judgment” to help teachers more efficiently and accurately judge student performance by comparing their work to one another. Using paired comparison/forced-choice surveys in many of the inherently subjective decisions that we make daily, from assessing creative quality, to prioritizing roadmaps, to choosing restaurants, allows us to easily capture the way we naturally make decisions by focusing on relative differences.
This is the reason why we are building Condorsay.
As always, please respond to this email with any questions, feedback, or ideas on how we can make Condorsay better.
With gratitude,
JB