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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3796 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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On psychology research: How do I find if there have ever been studies done to see how much people are primed to agree with survey questions, regardless of the context?

Example: Consider the "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree" scale of questioning. Suppose a group of people are randomly assigned a list of questions that ask the same content from two different directions. "I feel safe if I park near the front of an ATM" versus "I feel unsafe if I park near the front of an ATM". Two questions with opposite directions. If people are rational on average, you would expect the amount that agree with the first question would roughly equal the amount that disagree with the second question.

I suspect that people are not rational about these questions. I suspect that people are simply more likely agree with whatever statement you put in front of them, positive or negative. I also suspect that the tendency to agree with the statement may be skewed by the demographics of people taking the survey: socioeconomic, age, race.

I have no proof of this hunch, and it feels kinda Dark Arts to even suggest this is probable. Do we know if there is ongoing research to confirm or deny this claim?

What about moderation bias? Are there groups of people that are much more likely to answer "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree" to any question vs answering "agree" or "disagree"? I find that the larger the scale, the more likely I am to navigate towards its center.

It's been a visible technique in psych inventories I've taken to invert ~half the Likert questions-scale questions, which seems like correcting for precisely this type of bias. I haven't seen it in political polls I've taken. I infer that it's a Best Practice for those who really care about such things, or at worst net-zero cargo-culting, and that invoking this bias is a useful technique for those who want to engineer a biased survey.

I don't have any research cites on hand.... but then again, who needs research when you have Yes, Minister?

There's a bias towards the left-most response in likert scales, too (undoubtedly contingent on writing direction)

https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pfi.21800

This is called acquiescence bias.

From a cursory googling I found this study comparing a few variables with how much acquiescence bias people from 20 European countries have. Age didn't affect the result much, but "respondents with a low degree of conservatism and with a lower level of educational attainment exhibited a higher tendency toward acquiescent responding"*.

* Though I am a little confused here - the table above that quote in the study has "education" negatively correlated with acquiescent responding, but "conservatism" positive. Was there an error here or am I not reading something correctly...?

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