Do people lie to pollsters?
When asked, people tend to agree with socially acceptable positions and disagree with those they deem less desirable, even if that means lying about true beliefs.
Posted — UpdatedA white person who opposes interracial marriage, for example, probably feels social pressure to hold the opposite viewpoint or risks the consequences of being called a racist. In short, social pressure can cause survey respondents to give an answer that doesn’t match their true feelings.
Not only do people under-report socially undesirable beliefs, but also they over-report behaviors that are socially desirable. As the PEW explains, “research has shown that respondents understate alcohol and drug use, tax evasion and racial bias; they may also overstate church attendance, charitable contributions, and the likelihood that they will vote in an election.”
Their study, though, is worth reviewing because of how it was conducted. PRRI asked “identical questions about religious attendance, affiliation, salience and belief in God on two surveys – one via telephone and the other online – and compared the results.” According to PRRI, Americans report being more religious in the telephone sample compared with the online sample. More specifically, 36 percent of Americans reported attending religious services “weekly or more” over the telephone, compared with 31 percent on the online survey. Likewise, 30 percent of telephone respondents and 43 percent of online survey respondents said they attend religious services “seldom” or “never.”
Why does greater church attendance reported in the telephone sample mean that those respondents were less truthful? The assumption is that honesty in surveys increases when their privacy is maximized. Besides assuring a respondent anonymity, how a survey is administered is the key factor. A respondent who is interviewed in person with the questions and answers spoken out loud, for example, has the minimal privacy. Conversely, a respondent who can read and answer survey questions alone on a computer has maximum privacy.
Ideally, all respondents in this study would have been recruited at the same time, via the same method. After that, half of the sample would be randomly assigned to complete the survey via the Internet while the other half would complete it over the phone. That kind of randomization would have eliminated the possibility that response bias and not social desirability was responsible for the differences in church attendance.
Nevertheless, this study offers a great example of how social desirability can influence what we think about how people really think and behave.
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