Hacker News Reader

I would love to see a survey where people are asked both "how much do you agree" and "how likely are you to say so publicly". Given enough questions, it'd also be interesting to find out if the Left or the Right generally feels more suppressed. (I'm obsessed with the possibility that Clinton lost because the Left pressured people to deny that they supported Trump.)

View on HN

That wouldn't work like you're hoping. You're assuming a (representative) respondent pool that's all of these:

1. capable of switching off preference falsification for a survey

2. introspectively active (and accurately so) over a long enough period to notice that they behave differentially in public and private contexts

3. interested in exposing this degree of candor for a survey, i.e. motivated to "show the researchers" (show themselves, really) their belly after collapsing across all the reasons they'd rather not.

Humans are primitive. Questionnaires have to be designed around that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com