Design of experiments

And those kind of clever tricks that you do, how do you come up with that? How did you learn to think like that, like to figure out?

Well I was very lucky because when I was a doctoral student my doctoral advisor was somebody called Peter Bryant who was extremely good at experimental design and realizing that you know you needed a control for this and a control for that to rule out alternative interpretations and so I think I benefited from his modeling the experimental technique, but also by and large trying to design rather simple experiments where the contrast was pretty clear between this condition and that condition.

Yeah, so there's no room for other interpretations.

Right.

Zero.

You weren't even taught how to do statistics.

My dear advisor, Peter Bryan, told me about this textbook by R.E. Kirk called Experimental Design in the Behavioral Sciences, which was all about analysis of variance.

And I remember struggling through it one Christmas vacation.

Yes.

Let's talk about the experimental design and what's new.

You examined three disclosure formats that you describe in the article as expandable, full disclosure, and salient disclosure.

The salientest condition seems especially policy relevant.