Sarah Igo came yesterday in our seminar to tell us about her recent book, The Averaged American. It was a lot of fun, and she commented that when she speaks to historians, they just let her speak, but we’re more fun because we interrupt her frequently. I assured her that if interruption=fun, then economists are the most fun of all…

The talk was an interesting historical overview of the Middletown, Gallup, and Kinsey surveys with some fun historical photos. One of the best things about the photos was the hidden world they revealed–all the things in the backgrounds. It reminded me of when I watched a bunch of Speed Racer cartoons with Phil in a movie theater in the early 90s. These were low-budget Japanese cartoons from the 60s that we loved as kids. From my adult perspective, the best parts were during the characters’ long drives, where you could see Japanese industrial scenes in the background.

Survey costs and technology

To get back to Igo’s topic: her main theme was how the existence of surveys changed Americans’ ideas of the mass public as an agglomeration of individuals rather than interest groups or social classes. Thinking about the changes since the 1950s, there are a lot more polls now, and this would seem to be technology-driven: it’s just a lot cheaper to do a survey now than it used to be. I actually think it should be considered unethical to survey people without compensating them.

Relevant to the discussion here is the hilarious (but sad) movie Our Brand is Crisis, which shows U.S. political consulting techniques being introduced in Bolivia.

What do we learn from polls?

There was a lively discussion in the seminar about what people learn from surveys. Most obviously, they learn issue opinions, for example that most people support the death penalty, the country is divided on abortion, and most people oppose the Iraq war. I commented that this tends to reduce the “availability bias” under which people tend to think that most people share their opinions on issues: for example, I might think everyone supports my preferred Presidential candidate, but a simple poll will tell me it’s 50/50. But a couple of other possibilities came up:

1. Majorities can be politically strentghened. For example, once it is known that over 60% of the people agree with them, this strengthens the political efforts of death penalty advocates.

2. Minorities can be politically strengthened, for example, when Kinsey’s results were extrapolated to estimate that 10% of Americans were gay [this was questionable for methodological reasons, but that’s another story].

3. Tolerance: once I realize that I’m on the minority in many issues, I become more tolerant of minority rights in general. Of course, most people are in the majority in any given issue (if there are 2 options), but each of us is in the minority on some issues.

4. Polling and the illusion of control: According to Igo, presidents from Roosevelt on have had internal polling organizations. I conjecture that this convenient polling gives politicians the illusion that they can’t lose–that they can just use polling to alter their pitches until they come up with something popular.