Iain Duncan Smith's wages and the uncertain nature of online petitions

Recent calls for a severe reduction in pay for Iain Duncan Smith show that there is a lot of enthusiasm for online petitions. But evidence for their effectiveness doesn't necessarily support their widespread use
Iain Duncan Smith
Iain Duncan Smith, possibly contemplating a life on £53 a week. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

I'd like to say I support the sentiment behind the change.org petition demanding that Iain Duncan Smith back up his claims and live on £53 a week. I'm a scientist; of course I think that extraordinary claims should have extraordinary evidence to support them. However, it's important to consider alternative explanations too. Maybe Duncan Smith thinks £53 is worth considerably more than it actually is. Like much of the current government, his policies and views seem to be based in a bygone era, so maybe his economic knowledge is too? He may well think £53 is more than enough to dine at the Savoy several times a week, sampling the finest foods brought in from all corners of the Empire and still have enough change left for a hansom cab home and even several shoe shines from an urchin.

The above is a joke (I hope), but of course it's a serious matter for many people. Those in power should have some understanding of the impositions they put on people whose lives they're controlling, or even ruining. And as is standard these days, the response has been an online petition, in this case to make Duncan Smith accept a salary of £53 a week.

Online petitions are a fascinating phenomenon of modern society, but how useful are they really? In some cases, people see them as more of a way to make a point than a genuine attempt to make serious changes. Even if the latest petition were to be genuinely taken seriously by Duncan Smith, which is unlikely, I don't see there being much in the way of legal grounds for forcing an MP to give up 97% of his pay because a large number of people filled in a virtual form. Same with Richard Littlejohn; I doubt there is a clause in his contract promising employment "unless a specific number of people ideologically opposed to your views explicitly state that you should be sacked".

The importance of making a point shouldn't be understated. Politicians, in the UK at least, do seem somewhat out of touch with the modern world. Many have seemed somewhat aggrieved by the fact that large numbers of the public have had the audacity to criticise them outside of a general election. They react with the shock and confusion of a dairy farmer who's just discovered the cows have formed a union and are demanding more lenient milking hours.

As always, there are counterarguments. Online petitions and their widespread use are a relatively new occurrence, and the evidence supporting their effectiveness still remains somewhat fuzzy.

The aforementioned Duncan Smith petition is presented as if it's completely serious in its intentions, and it may well have been when it was devised. But with over 400,000 signatures there is bound to be a mix of people who think it could actually happen, people who think it's more of a gesture, and others with alternative outcomes in mind. There'll probably be a lot of people disappointed with the eventual outcome.

This is often the case, as there's still a lot of uncertainty as to how "legitimate" online petitions are. Large numbers of signatures are seemingly perceived differently when in an online context, and it's easy to see why. Currently over 400,000 have signed a quasi-serious petition designed to embarrass a politician for saying something controversial. Contrastingly, the official petition to stop the highly controversial and deeply unpopular Health and Social Care bill attracted 179, 459 signatures.

Obviously there are numerous variables to take into account. The Health and Social Care bill is a far more complex issue (probably deliberately so) and the petition happened over a year ago, which is a long time online, in which epetitions and social networking have expanded considerably. But looking just at the numbers it still seems like a lot more people care about embarrassing an MP than preserving the NHS.

And to give it some worrying context, the Health and Social Care bill petition got nearly 180,000 signatures. Why, that's over twice as many people who retweeted Justin Bieber's stating that he's aware of his own sexiness! And slightly more than the number of people who officially claim to be a Jedi! That's obviously not the main reason it was ignored, but these sorts of numbers do argue against the significance of online petitions somewhat.

Obviously there's a difference between something serious and something silly, but there are other potentially confounding factors for online petitions. There are several big organisations that create many of the petitions we see. I've signed up to a lot of these myself. But this leads to other issues. For one, the emails asking for support are always so definitive. They'd have to be; you're not going to get many involved by saying "a sort-of bad thing might happen, in a way, if we don't act to possibly stop it, whatever it is". But when the claims made are undermined, this can seriously damage the credibility of the petitions themselves.

The obvious example is the Avaaz "Frankenfish" campaign, which seemed to be essentially anti-GM scaremongering and paranoia. Maybe this was one slip up, but it now makes me question how credible any other petition is. Some research suggests that when confident people are shown to make an obvious mistake, this can cause the worst possible damage to their credibility. Who's to say this doesn't happen with organisations like this?

I could investigate every claim myself, but given the number of petitions there are, this would be tantamount to a full time job, giving rise to accusations of cause fatigue.

All of the above criticisms may be valid or they may not; it's hard to generalise with online petitions, they never occur in a vacuum and don't really exist for their own sake; they're always a response to something. Accusations of "slactivism" are inevitable, although that's a more complex area than you may suspect. So given all this, why are online petitions increasingly popular?

Hopefully it's not something analogous to the dot.com bubble and crash, where everyone got overly excited about something before finding out if it actually worked or not. The main thing to remember with online petitions is that sometimes they do work. Even if it may be more to do with corporate pressure, petitions do appear to be effective in some cases. This may lead to a fundamental type of learning taking place.

Operant conditioning is where certain behaviours are rewarded/punished in order to encourage/prevent them. If you're rewarding a behaviour, the manner in which the reward is delivered can be very important. There is the option of using a variable-reinforcement schedule, which means that the behaviour is rewarded 20% of the time (for example). The important thing is, there's no way of knowing which time the reward will come, there's no pattern to it, so you learn that each time is potentially rewarding. Ergo, attempts to undo the learning by not rewarding the behaviour don't work as the subject is already accustomed to that. This is how gambling addictions occur, and why they're so hard to get rid of.

Is this what's happening to us all en-masse with online petitions? We sign them on a regular basis and more often than not, they don't work. Except that, occasionally and unpredictably, they do, and we get the reward of feeling like we made a difference (which arguably is the case). Confirmation bias can enhance this effect.

That's just one explanation for the popularity of online petitions despite all the confusion that surrounds their use. Odds are, there are other better ones, and many people will take exception to my claims and start an online petition to have me sacked, and as this is the Guardian and I'm a relative nobody, it'll be successful. Still, at least then I'll get my picture next to "hubris" in the dictionary.

Every cloud, and all that.

Dean Burnett has no actual problem with online petitions, and will occasionally encourage people to join in via Twitter, @garwboy

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