Suppose you conduct an opinion poll and get answer X on a particular question. If you follow up with a question like “But what if…..” then X is likely to change. But how much? Is there some minimum amount of change you’ll get no matter what followup question you ask?
I asked that question a couple of weeks ago, and Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily decided to investigate. The result was a cheap-and-cheerful nonscientific online poll that gauged whether some people would change their minds no matter what the followup question was. I’ve been sworn to secrecy until now, but here are the results:
While it is true that someone changed their answer for each question, in some cases, very few people did. Consider the responses to the question “Should the United States withdraw all troops from Afghanistan?”….While 35 percent of respondents said they’d change their answer if the US kept one base in Afghanistan to address only the terrorist threat, only 4 percent said they’d change their answer to the original question if the US also closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Aside from one genuinely out-of-the-blue question, that seems to have been the baseline: you can get 4% of your respondents to change their minds no matter what the followup is. That’s actually pretty low.
But there’s more! Who changes their minds more, liberals or conservatives? Click to link to find out.
