My Take | Dodgy research that pays Hong Kong students to protest
- HKUST was right to withdraw its research approval from an international team of economists targeting its own students, but why did it allow them initially?
The more you protest, the likelier you will join the next protest. The more people in your social network protest, the likelier you and your friends will protest the next time. The more you think people will join a protest, whether you know them or not, in other words, the bigger you think the protest crowd will be, the likelier you will join them.
I bet many of us suspect such outcomes, even if most of us don’t have PhDs from some of the world’s most prestigious universities.
But wouldn’t you be glad to have them empirically confirmed by some bright young professors, using Hong Kong’s own university students over multiple years as sampling groups, while paying them to protest?
They were paid HK$205 to HK$350 (US$26 to US$45), with additional cash rewards depending if they had completed all the questionnaires through the different research stages.
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Peaceful protests are part of Hong Kong city life and must return
The group of economists have recently gathered a great deal of bad publicity after the leftist Ta Kung Pao newspaper ran a full front page on their studies, claiming they were irrefutable proof of foreign influence corrupting our youth and inciting them to riot.