3.3 Main causal analysis
Having confirmed that the intervention we implemented in the experiment reasonably satisfies the necessary requirements, we now continue to the analysis directly related to the research question we study in this work. Specifically, as we explained in the introduction and in Section 2, if herding behaviour exists, we expect it to manifest in the final decisions being disproportionately influenced by the opinion of the discussion initiator. Hence, given that for the positive group of papers To understand the effect of the experiment, we first note the observed mean final scores in different sets of reviewers corresponding to groups 
First, the data does not indicate a statistically significant difference between acceptance rates in the two groups of papers (Second, the data on the score updates suggests that in their final evaluations, reviewers tend to converge to the mean of initial independent opinions irrespective of the treatment we applied to a paper. Indeed, Row 2 demonstrates that the initiators of discussions update the scores towards the mean of all initial scores. Next, Rows 3 and 4 show that a significant update made by the discussion initiators is compensated by the update made by other reviewers, such that the overall amount of change in the mean scores is negligible. As expected, the outlined dynamics result in a significant decrease in the variance of scores per paper, but the effect is the same for both groups of papers (Row 5).