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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Nice!!. Sheep complaining to the butcher. Who are the all these ppl wasting their time on these,are ppl that naive.

It takes all of 30 seconds to do this and does at least catch the attention of the press and the rest of us. But yes, I agree it's probably futile, exactly because of how easy it is to sign these. Petitions are neat when they have the force of law behind them, such as signing a petition to put something on the ballot to be voted upon. But, yeah, people need to be out protesting and organizing boycotts.

In Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini makes the compelling case that (non-legally-binding) petitions have a primary effect on the people signing the petition, not the explicit targets of the petition. Signing your name to a statement evokes consistency bias effects, which cause you to commit to those statements.

So they are still a useful tool for effecting change; just not for the reasons people might assume.

Huh. That's an interesting discovery; thanks for sharing it. That's going on my reading list.

Planned mass demonstration on July 4th: http://restorethefourth.net

But, yeah, people need to be out protesting

Even if it's "just" so they come together. I think that helps a great deal with the whole organizing, but also, and not unimportantly, s single person or a small group can motivate themselves through all snags only for so long.

So I think petitions are nice, but petition signing parties are nicer :) "came for the frustration, stayed for the resilience and creativity of the human spirit", that sort of thing.

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