Behind the Science: Our Peer-Reviewed Evidence

If you make big claims, bring the receipts

I expect zero percent of people to go and read a peer-reviewed journal article, but yeah, here it is.

As a professor, these are the most important things we make. They are the currency of the realm for us in getting and keeping jobs (“Publish or perish” is real). So when do they come in handy outside of the academy? When we make some big claim, they are how you know we aren’t full of BS.

Real metrics need to be this very boring thing called “falsifiable,” which means they can be proven wrong. If they can’t, you shouldn’t trust them. And so, yes, we have a peer-reviewed paper explaining what Social Value is, and laying out how it is in fact real, falsifiable, repeatable, and stands up to scrutiny and testing.

One of the cooler things we’ve ever done to prove this out is to find a bunch of people with with impact, measure it, and then check what would happen if this person dropped out. If we’re really right about impact, then their friends’ spending (or views, or whatever) should drop by that same amount. It does, with about 85% accuracy.