I want to add that the email notifications reveal the identity of people who add options to anonymous polls.

I just noticed that this has been expressed already: https://www.loomio.org/d/81cSRMUi/new-feature-anonymous-polling/20

And just want to add that I would find the ability to only see votes after a poll closed useful indeed, as to prevent a conformity effect.

I'd like to see a much more convincing study on the "conformity effect". I'm yet to see anything that even vaguely relates to what we're talking about here in Loomio (in my opinion). Asch's experiments were (as I understand) about meaningless and banal things people have zero feelings about ("how long is this line?") rather than "Is this fair?" A logician would argue that actually crowd wisdom is real (eg. guessing how many marbles in a jar) and logically your best best is to guess the mean number. I don't see this being relevant to contexts calling upon our intellect or emotions.

Dear @lukeflegg, a whole subdiscipline of psychology is dedicated to the effects of the actual or imagined presence of other social beings: social psychology. One of it's main findings is that knowing what others do changes own behavior. It is actually considered one way to change undesired behavior (such as, excessive drinking) to tell people that their social environment behaves differently (i. e. drinks less), as this makes descriptive norms available (see e. g. Lewis & Neighbors, 2006 or Wardell & Read, 2012 for another). It's called normative feedback intervention. Now for the present case you argue that Asch's experiment does not allow generalization as the tasks were meaningless and banal for the participants.

And for the meaninglessness, you're right! However, Baron et al. (1996) looked into the effects of task importance on conformity, and for difficult judgements, task importance even increased conformity! The participant's task was eyewitness identification, arguably neither meaningless nor banal.

However, I don't agree with you with regards to the banality. One would expect that conformity is only an issue for tasks whose solution is not obvious. Ash's experiment was so important because he showed that even for trivial tasks, where everybody on his own guesses right, group conformity occurs.

Now for the next part: I don't see how the phenomenon of crowd wisdom plays a role here. Group decision making is generally not an example of crowd wisdom (certain environments or conditions contribute to or harm group results, see Lanier, 2011). Besides, my statement is that voting results change if people know each other's preferences. Crowd wisdom is about the effect that for a certain set of tasks, an aggregated answer may be better than an individual's answer. But the wisdom of the crowd occurs in the crowd, not in the individual, which means: The fact that you mathematically combine independent answers leads to a better result, not the effect that each and every individual knows each other's answer (which would decrease result quality). Crowd wisdom does not work if people know each others choices. And a logician can't say anything about crowd wisdom as this is a phenomenon studied in psychology, not mathematics.

Finally, you write about intellect and emotions: A study by Blake et al. (1957) suggests that increasing task difficulty leads to increasing conformity. Allen (1965) provides an overview over various situational factors in conformity. I don't know about the effects of emotions regarding conformity, but my main point, that viewing other's choices makes a descriptive norm available, holds independently: “[A] secretive procedure may induce better decisions than a transparent one” (Levy, 2005).

This is also why the dot vote is generally a bad way of measuring group opinion (bandwagon effect), as is a show of hands or any other non-secretive procedure.

Harkins et al. (2017) may provide an in-depth overview of this topic, but the basics should be covered in every introductory textbook on social psychology, e. g. Smith et al. (2015).

Blimey! That is an overwhelmingly academic reply! I appreciate the care and attention of all of that, though I certainly don't have the time to look through the things you've cited there. I feel like you mostly but not completely understand me (and you make some interesting points, thanks) you talked a lot about importance and meaningfulness of tasks, that's probably me not using the right words - I meant more decisions that are multi faceted, involving a lot of factors and fairness, etc as well as being something you actually care about. Basically most of the decision I use Loomio for, which is why I have energy for this conversation. I'm not using Loomio for banal tasks or eye witness experiments, I'm using it to make decisions with people about festivals and projects and organisational decisions.
Anyway, you're definitely making me think more about it - I really hear your point about how the value of the individual being true to their own view can become distorted if they think it feel something about seeing how votes have played out so far. Reminds me of the dual slit theory in physics - observing the behaviour changes it.. I think there is something just actually quite engaging about seeing the status of a live vote, making it feel real and emerging and tempting to jump in.

Now I'm wondering what would've happened with Brexit if everyone saw the vote results bit then still had time to cast theirs if they haven't yet...

Well, kind of the problem of psychology is to reduce the theory to it's absolutely required set of assumption while retaining generalizability by the actual experiment carried out (comparable to just assuming mass points when studying gravity). The argument is like “If people conform in this simple situation, they will also conform in a more complex, multi-faceted ones.” But of course, the more theory and reality diverge, the less this holds true...

Yeah, I think it can't be that bad to keep this as a potential pitfall in mind.