Earlier this week, I set readers a quiz — The British public, eh? What do they know? — based on research undertaken by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London showing the British public is often wrong about what we think we know on a range of current social issues. For instance, we (collectively) massively over-estimate the proportion of people in this country who are black or Asian, or who are Muslim, or who are over 65. We also think, again wrongly, that crime is rising, and that more is spent on overseas aid than on pensions.
Over at The Conversation, Bobby Duffy, a senior research fellow at King’s, has outlined four explanations he thinks do most to account for how unreliable is the public’s knowledge of facts and figures:
First, there are simple measurement and definitional problems. It’s difficult to get across what can be quite complex and precise issues in simple survey questions.
But probably more importantly, the public are not always thinking about the things we think they are. For example, when we ask people what they were thinking of as benefit fraud when they guessed at its scale, they select items that can’t be counted as actual fraud. In people’s minds, it includes claimants not having paid tax in the past and people having children so they can claim more benefits.
Second, there are a whole range of cognitive errors, simple mistakes we make when answering these types of questions. This includes problems of statistical literacy – for example, we just struggle with very big or very small numbers, and find it hard to distinguish between rates and levels.
But there are also explanations from social psychology on the biases and shortcuts in how we think: for example, we know we’re more likely to focus on and remember negative information.
Third, there is certainly an impact from the media and political discourse. The links are complex and difficult to prove categorically, but the association between attitudes and media coverage is often strong. Of course, the media also reflects our concerns and tastes for types of information: to a large extent we get the media we want. The focus on vivid stories rather than straight facts is because we pay more attention to those vivid stories ourselves (we admit we rely on personal experience and information from those around us more than representative data).
Which leads onto the fourth key explanation – that these misperceptions may be an effect of our concerns rather than a cause. That is, we overestimate partly because we are worried about these things, rather than being worried because we believe we know their full extent. Academics call this “emotional innumeracy”: we’re making a point about what’s worrying us, whether we know it or not.
There is no easy solution to any of this.
Efforts to encourage/shame the media and politicians into using accurate statistics will help. So, too, can ‘citizens’ juries’: “deliberative workshops on tricky policy issues where information is provided, experts give evidence and people have time to reflect on things they don’t normally get the chance to”. Interestingly, this process was used by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) to consult the public on the appropriate level of MPs’ pay. Here’s what they found:
Our work with ComRes in 2012 showed that most members of the public, when initially considering MPs’ pay, did not think it should be increased. In fact, when asked how much MPs should be paid, a plurality pitched it in the £30,000-50,000 range, with the average figure being £49,710. In a citizens’ jury exercise, the participants discuss the issues for several hours and receive more supporting information than in a focus group. This allowed us to see whether attitudes changed with greater understanding of the subject. What we found is that some people did become more inclined towards somewhat higher pay for MPs. The decisive information was seeing what others, whose roles carried significant responsibilities, received.
The problem with ‘citizens’ juries’, of course, is that they’re not scaleable. But here Bobby Duffy has an intriguing suggestion:
… it’s obviously not very practical to get the whole population in a workshop for a day or so. However, new communication technology does provide easier ways to do this. It won’t be as cathartic and will only reach a subset, but online mass deliberations by independent organisations (say, the BBC) could play its part in improving our currently badly informed debates.
There’s something in that. Remarkably, the last time this country had a national referendum – on the ‘alternative vote’ – the BBC failed to broadcast a single peak-time debate on the issue, despite the fact that almost 20 million citizens turned out to vote. In the lead-up to the 2015 general election, there is a definite role for broadcasters to use their skills and experience to ensure that, amidst all the heated partisan noise and the temptation to fire-up ratings by dumbing down, the public gets the chance to hear the reasoned views of all sides before we make up our minds.
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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15 Comments
Reasons the Public get some of the Above well most is simply the propaganda of past and present Government and MP’s and opposition parties put out. I.e. the current Government is labelling unemployed and those on sick as scroungers layabouts etc the public view on drugs so muddled not based on facts Immigration by exaggerations by some MP’s and parties along with the press A Lot can be laid at your own door Start there to put things right. Your Faults.
It would be interesting to see what information was presented to the “Citizen’s Juries” and who chose it. I would suggest that if it included a session on political slogans such as
“An end to boom and bust”,
“No more broken promises”,
and the 2009 classic “The best way to get that (EU) referendum is to vote Conservative on Thursday”,
the result would be a lowering of the salary level deemed appropriate.
And, of course:
“Oppose higher tuition fees”
It could be argued that emotional innumeracy is not “wrong” but is in fact the right way to kick the technocrats towards focussing on what matters.
Unusually I agree with you, Joe. But it is more of a balance – parties must also engage with political education, to move voters away from prejudices. Difficult, long-term and sometimes vote-losing, but when you are a proper political party, with certain values, these must drive some of your actions.
The reason the BBC didn’t consider producing more informative programming for the AV referendum – and why we don’t more widely employ things like citizens’ juries – is largely down to our political culture. There is no way that No2AV would have resisted creating a shitstorm (if you’ll excuse my German) over the BBC’s decision to produce factual programmes, and would have been loudly backed up by their friends in the media (the people at the top of Yes would’ve taken that lying down, but that’s another matter). I’m sure the BBC thought about it for 30 seconds before concluding that it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Up until 2006, the Electoral Commission had a remit to promote voter engagement and was making some progress: until that power was taken away by the government under pressure from the Commons. In the UK, no information is viewed as being unpolitical. Everything is considered fair game, even the most banal of information. It’s what keeps most schools from providing decent political education and is why Stemwizjer and Wahl-o-Mat are state funded central parts of the Dutch and German elections, while Vote Match is a chronically under funded project dependent on private donations to keep going.
I’m sure plenty of liberals, too, would have concerns about the production of “neutral” information in political campaigns. There are solutions, but most public institutions (and charities, via the charities commission) are risk averse and would rather focus on other problems. Until the political class starts looking at this from a “can do” perspective, it won’t happen.
That’s bad for elections but it has even worse implications for referendums. Sadly, I suspect it is no coincidence that the people mst keen on having referendums for everything (gay marriage? Seriously?) are the very people who would rather keep the electorate in ignorance during the referendums themselves.
@ Terry
” I.e. the current Government is labelling unemployed and those on sick as scroungers layabouts etc”
I think you are unwittingly (?) illustrating the problem.
When can you point to anyone in government saying the things you accuse them of?
Surely that is just your impression of what they have said.
James, we are digressing here, but while I agree that Vote Match is a good thing, it hardly neutral to suggest that you should vote for the party whose policies you support, and that more than two or three options exist. Under FPTP it is also important to realise that X can’t win here, whether that is a squeeze message in a Lib Dem target seat, or a reasonable default assumption somewhere else.
By existing at all, Vote Match is showing us all another way in which FPTP is undemocratic. Good job there. But I wouldn’t expect state funding for such a thing.
Another one I found, was social housing tenants have children who smash green house windows.
In society, there will always be someone who needs the help to stay afloat, when things for wrong.
“new communication technology does provide easier ways to do this”
Totally, agree, if we can have on-line voting for Dancing on Ice – using the ‘app’, I’m sure we can use the same system for more practical applications. I’m a little surprised that they haven’t tried it yet for current affairs programmes…
The BBC did one very good programme where the case for an against AV was debated, with both sides and independent experts in attendance, and where they staged a vote with the new system to demonstrate how it works. It was exactly the kind of thing that was suggested here.
The problem? It was on Radio Five Live, and, if I remember correctly, sometime around lunch time (though available to listen to later, as I did when somebody alerted me to it).
Something like that on TV, at prime time, would have been excellent.
it’s a bit like being able to take part in this debate, the first comment shown above was 22 hrs before the posting appeared in my in-box.. the first few comments tend to form the direction of any of these discussions, and the same for the media.. whoever gets their story out first can slant it’s emphasis to suit their particular bias, and the rest tend to follow suit.
‘the media reflect our concerns and tastes’.. er, actually the media tend to DRIVE public opinion.
‘the reasoned views of all sides’ is the one thing that the media, press in particular, should be REQUIRED to publish, in order to aid informing the public, yet, stupidly, the old PCC code specifically ALLOWS a newspaper to be partisan, (= biased and distorting the story) and that, seemingly is going to continue to be the case post Leveson.. are we all blind?!
Terry and RC above illustrate part of the confusion… is it what government/ politicians say, or what the media say that they have said? They often manage, not just to re-interpret a story but to stand the facts on their head.
That line in mis-information is rife, as any politician can confirm.. and oddly people will believe about you what your opponents tell them about you, – now there would be something worth studying.!
Tony Blair was disingenuous with his famous three part quote.
Should have been: propaganda: propaganda: propaganda.
No wonder that the population at large has no idea of the reality of anything. Finding out the truth about any event is nye on impossible. The greatest and most obvious truths are often the biggest lies – and continue to be so.
It’s amazing how the media sometimes gives the wrong impression. For example, even the Independent used words like ‘suffer’ and ‘worse off’ and ‘reduce’ when describing budget changes like the welfare cut to 1%; this is taken by the public to mean that people’s income will actually reduce, when what was actually meant was that their income will not increase by as much as if the changes had not taken place. One had to listen carefully to longer-term analyses from the IFS that came a day or two later, to get the proper picture of what was going on and how many of the public would have heard or read all that ?
I suppose it is up to us activists to put out the right information, but then our own party does not help because the information they supply is often accompanied by spin.