|
>Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you. Yep, this is why so many polls are BS: the questions are worded in such a way to coerce people to answer a certain way, or options are left out. It may not even be intentional; if you use the OKCupid dating site, they have thousands of questions you can answer so that it can match you up with people. I think a lot of these questions (probably most) were actually submitted by users, and many times they have terrible choices. For instance, there's one question about dogs: it asks if you want to own a dog or not. The choices are (I don't have the exact Q in front of me here) "yes, I do or would love to own a dog!", or "No, I dislike dogs". WTF? If you pick the latter, it makes you look like you hate dogs. But what if you like dogs just fine and are generally an animal-loving person, but you just don't want to own and care for a dog? I like horses well enough too, but that doesn't mean I want to buy a horse farm and fill the barn with horses. I think iguanas are cute, but I don't really want one as a pet. I think parrots are beautiful and interesting animals, but I really don't want to live with all that squawking (plus I think they should be left in the wild). But somehow because I don't want to take care of a dog, I'm suddenly a dog-hater according to this poll question. The way a poll question is designed really reflects a lot on the bias of the person writing the poll; the only way to mitigate it is to have every poll question thoroughly scrutinized by a diverse committee. But they never are, they just run the poll, collect the data, and assume it to be gospel truth. |