What is the probative value of a public poll to support an argument?

[Selene]

In our present information age, all of us use polls to buttress our argumentation.

My question is why?

By employing "polls," are we not slipping into fallacious use of argumentum ad populum, for example, as Wiki explains:

In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges: "If many believe so, it is so."

This type of argument is known by several names,^[1] including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people, argument by consensus, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin by the names argumentum ad populum ("appeal to the people"), argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect, the spreading of various religious beliefs, and of the Chinese proverb 'three men make a tiger'"

Should we be very skeptical in evaluating public-opinion polls?

"Polls are based on self-selected samples when the people whose opinions are being measured have put themselves into the sample.

1. 1. A television call-in poll overrepresents people with strong enough opinions to call and register their opinions.
   2. Although such polls may measure strength of feeling, they do not indicate what the general population believes.
   3. Advocacy groups might commission polls that are worded in such a way as to produce a more favorable response. These are polls with slanted questions.
      1. Slanted questions introduce a form of bias that is separate from the representativeness of the sample.
      2. Loaded questions can pretend to solicit an opinion while suggesting a claim: "Do you favor reducing death and street crime by means of emergency housing?"
      3. At other times it is the order that questions come in that skews the results.

      I am interested in getting your feedback,

      Adam

[william.scherk]

In our present information age, all of us use polls only to buttress our argumentation. Sp

This statement affirms the consequent of the following question. That is fallacious. We do not all of us use opinion polls only to buttress our argmentation. Sometimes 'we' use/explore or analyze opinion polls to test our argumentation, or to test assumptions about public opinion.

I note that your formulation also omits the usual modifier: opinion poll. A poll, in an of itself, can be many things. We 'go to the polls' at an election. "The only poll that matters is the one taken on Polling Day." "I am going to poll the neighbourhood."

My question is why?

Your question is already answered -- as far as you are concerned, you only use polls to buttress your argumentation, and presumably, if someone uses an opinion poll to challenge your own estimation of public opinion, you would dismiss the opinion poll as useless, biased, blahbitty blah.

Some of your following thoughts (if they are your own thoughts -- sometimes it is difficult to separate your cut-and-paste jobs from your own opinions) are interesting, if incomplete and biased.

You haven't tried to tell us what the difference is between a bad opinion poll and a good opinion poll, and you haven't given any indication that there could possibly be any use of an opinion poll beyond buttressing argumentation.

Why would anyone attempt to answer such a loaded question as you pose?

Please give an example of (and link to) a poll that you have evaluated. Include the methodology, who commissioned it, the question, and the various uses you think that particular opinion poll can be put to, good and bad.

-- the French word for opinion poll is sondage. This means, roughly, sounding -- a cognate to dropping a weight over the side of a boat to measure depth.

Why would anyone wish to make a sounding?

Edited February 20, 2011 by william.scherk

[Philip Coates]

Adam, A public poll can't support an argument (e.g., 80% of those with graduate degrees in science believe in global warming, therefore it is likely true). If it's well-done, statistically significant, has good methodology it can tell you other things -- who is likely to win the upcoming election, etc.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Adam,

There is a very interesting discussion of polls in Coercion by Douglas Rushkoff, the chapter on public relations.

According to him, one of the secrets to public relations is to find the myths that people learn within a culture, then find out the parts that are so superstitious or irrational that the myth-holder can easily replace them and still hold on to the myth, then mess around with those parts in some manner.

He gave a good example of the Catholic Church during the Colonial period. The priests learned the pantheistic religions of the Indians, then gradually informed them that the their different deities were very similar to Catholic Saints and helped them change their prayer rituals. After a time, this started becoming accepted.

I know the deity religions in Brazil like Umbanda and Macumba have this kind of mix between African deities and Catholic Saints. It is common for them to light a 7 day candle to some Saint or other that, at root, includes an imported mythological god. I always used to wonder why that happened.

This is a "softening up" PR measure to bring the slaves under control and accept white authority (or, better, authority emanating from the structures brought over from Euorpe). They just didn't call it public relations back then.

In modern terms, our myths are often oversimplifications with an emotional load. One good way to defuse that emotional load is simply to rename the myth. Rushkoff gave the example of how sewage "sludge," which is generally considered as toxic and disgusting, was renamed to "biosolid" so it could be used on farmlands. Same stuff, different name. Voila. The public disgust evaporates.

The politicians have had a field day with deceptive renaming and, although it still works, it only works up to a point. The public's BS meter is becoming well attuned to this kind of manipulation. When this technique--and other PR tricks--started hurting the actual PR companies, they needed another tool. This ended up being polls.

One of the examples Rushkoff give of how the myth approach backfired and damaged a major company was with the incubator tale for the USA entering the first Iraq war. A 15 year old Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah, told about how Iraqi soldiers came to a hospital and confiscated the incubators, removing the babies already in them and leaving them on the cold hard floor to die.

Our "myth," which is more of a a core belief then myth, is that Westernized babies have a lot better care than babies in other countries. So if we hear of babies in other countries in difficulties, it carries a light emotional load. We feel that they don't have our resources, so they obviously have some difficulty or other. By Westernizing the story with technology (incubators), the horror hit home hard to the American public.

It later came out that Nayirah was the daughter of Sheikh Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that the entire campaign was mostly spin. The company behind it, Hill & Knowlton, took a major hit to its reputation and the entire public perception of the war in America was changed for the worse (from the standpoint of the Bush Senior administration).

So the PR companies turned to public polling as a new tool. That way they removed themselves from being the moral cause of a public deception and put it squarely on the public. After all, if the public wants something, who can blame a company (or politician) for giving it to them? Since polls can be easily manipulated in all kinds of manners, even by the order in which questions are asked, this tool became very popular with PR firms. They allow deceptive people to justify poor practices.

Also, the numbers give an aura of legitimacy that a simple story doesn't. To quote Rushkoff (p. 150), "A good poll is worth more than an eyewitness account."

One thing worth noting is that, when PR firms are intent on deception, they are more interested in deceiving their clients than the public. They are also interested in giving their clients "flexible" tools so their clients can be the ones to actually deceive the public, not them.

This is a long fascinating study. Rushkoff leans left, so most of his examples are abuses by conservative folks. However, we can see all around us the same things happening from the left. For instance, the entire Global Warming thing was basically a massive PR campaign. Notice how polling has entered the picture as a latecomer. At the start, science was used for proof and validation. After it became evident that the science world was strongly divided on this issue, the people promoting Global Warming started using public polls. You can still see them at times on news programs.

btw - I have the book Resonate by Nancy Duarte. Her company is not a PR firm, but works like one. She is responsible for structuring the overwhelmingly effective presentation Al Gore did in An Inconvenient Truth. (That is, effective at the time. Now it is widely seen as a pile of presentation techniques hiding a deceptive agenda.) Her approach is pure audience manipulation. I haven't read this book yet--and admittedly it was published after Gore's movie--but the person behind it is the same and her principles are merely refined, not changed.

I like this stuff. I like to see what makes public perception work. Gore's campaign is an excellent study in public manipulation and deception taken to the extreme. (My intent is not to deceive with my own works, but instead to later write works on how to detect and resist manipulation.)

Getting away from Rushkoff and Gore, there is another use for public polling. Incredible as it may seem, polls can be useful for actually gathering hard information. A good example of this happened when Dick Morris used public polls to save Bill Clinton's butt for reelection. In this case, the client was in panic mode and there was no room for polling BS. They had to do the real deal. And they did. Clinton changed his messages and policies based on those polls and won his second term.

This shows that polls are good when they are used correctly. The problem for us out here in the public is to know when they are being used deceptively and when they are the real deal.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

I am interested in getting your feedback,

Adam

The Majority is an ass. Almost all good or right ideas start off as minority stands or opinions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

I am interested in getting your feedback,

Adam

The Majority is an ass. Almost all good or right ideas start off as minority stands or opinions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.” – Albert J. Nock

Shayne

[caroljane]

I am interested in getting your feedback,

Adam

The Majority is an ass. Almost all good or right ideas start off as minority stands or opinions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.” – Albert J. Nock

Shayne

Yes, the people are always revolting, but they're all we've got.

[Selene]

Adam,

There is a very interesting discussion of polls in Coercion by Douglas Rushkoff, the chapter on public relations.

According to him, one of the secrets to public relations is to find the myths that people learn within a culture, then find out the parts that are so superstitious or irrational that the myth-holder can easily replace them and still hold on to the myth, then mess around with those parts in some manner.

In modern terms, our myths are often oversimplifications with an emotional load. One good way to defuse that emotional load is simply to rename the myth. Rushkoff gave the example of how sewage "sludge," which is generally considered as toxic and disgusting, was renamed to "biosolid" so it could be used on farmlands. Same stuff, different name. Voila. The public disgust evaporates.

The politicians have had a field day with deceptive renaming and, although it still works, it only works up to a point. The public's BS meter is becoming well attuned to this kind of manipulation. When this technique--and other PR tricks--started hurting the actual PR companies, they needed another tool. This ended up being polls.

So the PR companies turned to public polling as a new tool. That way they removed themselves from being the moral cause of a public deception and put it squarely on the public. After all, if the public wants something, who can blame a company (or politician) for giving it to them? Since polls can be easily manipulated in all kinds of manners, even by the order in which questions are asked, this tool became very popular with PR firms. They allow deceptive people to justify poor practices.

Also, the numbers give an aura of legitimacy that a simple story doesn't. To quote Rushkoff (p. 150), "A good poll is worth more than an eyewitness account."

One thing worth noting is that, when PR firms are intent on deception, they are more interested in deceiving their clients than the public. They are also interested in giving their clients "flexible" tools so their clients can be the ones to actually deceive the public, not them.

I like this stuff. I like to see what makes public perception work. Gore's campaign is an excellent study in public manipulation and deception taken to the extreme. (My intent is not to deceive with my own works, but instead to later write works on how to detect and resist manipulation.)

Getting away from Rushkoff and Gore, there is another use for public polling. Incredible as it may seem, polls can be useful for actually gathering hard information. A good example of this happened when Dick Morris used public polls to save Bill Clinton's butt for reelection. In this case, the client was in panic mode and there was no room for polling BS. They had to do the real deal. And they did. Clinton changed his messages and policies based on those polls and won his second term.

This shows that polls are good when they are used correctly. The problem for us out here in the public is to know when they are being used deceptively and when they are the real deal.

Michael

Michael:

This is what I was hoping to get in response to my thread.

As Rushkoff explains in his opening,:

"They say human beings use only ten percent of their brains. They say polyunsaturated fat is better for you than saturated fat. They say that tiny squiggles in a rock prove there once was life on Mars. They say our children's test scores are declining. They say Jesus was a direct descendant of King David. They say you can earn $15,000 a week in your spare time. They say marijuana leads to LSD, and LSD can lead to suicide. They say the corner office is a position of power. They say the elderly should get flu shots this season. They say homosexuality is an environmentally learned trait. They say there's a gene for homosexuality. They say people can be hypnotized to do anything. They say people won't do anything under hypnosis that they wouldn't do when conscious. They say Prozac alleviates depression. They say mutual funds are the best long-term investment. They say computers can predict the weather. They say you haven't met your deductible. "

Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say

I have been using this paragraph from the introduction for years, but I never read the entire book, which I just ordered based on your explanation of it.

The methodology that we developed back in the '60s and that we use even more effectively in any political campaigns we get hired by, utilizes both aspects of "polling" that you astutely point out:

1) information gathering;

2) conditioning, myth creation and persuasion.

Since we are generally retained to recruit and develop a field organization that is geared to an election day operation, it is important to take control of the information acquisition and presentation to the candidate. If we do not control that element, we cannot control the election day operation and that will minimize our ability to win, or, if the campaign is an insurgent campaign, to maximize our chances to win and pull off the upset.

Therefore, polling becomes the essential tool to accomplish both goals. As we, "push poll," we are learning the lay of the land at the election district lever, e.g., what are the three (3) most important problems in your neighborhood question. We will get everything from the catch basin on the corner is always clogged to there is a plan to widen the railroad bridge in town and that will cause my business to fail.

This will allow us to target messages as well as build up an organization.

Additionally, we are able to follow up with a different set of polling questions ten days later which gets our candidates message out. Candidate A says y about z and candidate B says q about z, how do you feel about this issue on a scale of 1-10, etc.

All of this data is then carefully packaged and presented to the candidate, and his/her handlers and decisions are made.

I love this stuff also.

You make an excellent point that these tools can be used for good or evil, but it is critical for folks to be able to recognize the how and whys of manipulation because it is constantly employed.

As Rushkoff explains,:

"Once you were reduced by my story to the role of a passive spectator in a state of mild captivation, I could lead you down to the next level of vulnerability: trance. I asked you to envision yourself reading the book in your hands right now. Like a hypnotist asking you to watch your breath, I employed a standard trance-induction technique called "disassociation": You are no longer simply reading this book, but picturing yourself reading the book. By separating your awareness from your actions, you become the observer of your own story. Your experience of volition is reduced to what a New Age psychotherapist would call a "guided visualization." From the perspective of coercion technicians who call themselves "neuro-linguistic programmers" (hypnotists who use the habits of the nervous system to reprogram our thought processes), this state of consciousness renders you quite vulnerable. The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self-consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs. "

As Dennis Miller says, it is ABC, or, ALWAYS BE CLOSING.

Great post Michael.

Thanks.

Adam

[Selene]

This is from Rushkoff's website:

Rushkoff's Website

"The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of 'old' media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled – but not determined – by digital technology.

In the software industry, the open source movement emphasizes[sic] collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.

All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.

What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the 'source code' of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? 'An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,' he answers."

I was talking with some faculty from Rutgers this morning about this very aspect of the times we are living in.

Essentially, I was pointing out that we have moved through the information age and information revolution to the communication age and revolutions.

The fact that we are no longer passive recipients of information digitally delivered. Now we are in two way communication with the rest of the world instantly.

This is a profound change and it is why the new media and mediums is changing us and the world at an exponentially increasing pace.

This is one reason that we still have a chance to change this government.

Adam

Edited February 20, 2011 by Selene