two headed citizens

There are few thing pundits and political strategists like more than a poll, whether it tells them which candidates are leading the race, how much the president's approval ratings have dropped or whether Americans are for or against building a mosque near Ground Zero.

But polls can be slippery things. For one, they give the illusion that those polled are of one mind - that people actually disapprove of the president's performance or that they believe a mosque has a right to be built in downtown New York.

Social psychologists (and their cousins, political psychologists and behavioral economists) will tell you that, in fact, people are usually quite ambivalent about their preferences and beliefs; that is, we are capable of holding two contradictory views in our heads at once (and often do). It's only when we're asked our opinion that one of those views will come to the fore. (A bit like Heisenberg's electrons.) And what makes one opinion bounce to prominence over the other depends on a slew of things; how the question is asked, what's been in the news lately, what your boyfriend said to you last night, whether you got a particularly good latte that morning, etc.

A couple of marketing profs give a good example of the first factor: it's all in how you frame the question. In a study that looked at the familiarity effect (which I'll leave for future posts), they asked people how fair and honest they thought Nike and Reebok were as firms. Depending upon how the question was put they got very different results, as you can see in the chart at top.

How'd that happen? The authors conjecture that people in general have stronger feelings about Nike than Reebok because Nike is a much more familiar brand - but those feelings are ambivalent. So when you ask which firm is more "fair and honest", you'll automatically light up the parts of people's brains that associate Nike with "fair and honest" and vice versa when you ask "unfair and dishonest."

This is a phenomenon known as "priming" and it happens to all of us all day. Rather than having brains with a set of static views, we're all a jumble of conflicting opinions and preferences. It's only when the pollster rolls around and asks us to commit one way or the other that we select the opinion whose neurons are firing more loudly. So are the pollsters getting our true opinion - or just the latest "primer" we ran across?