{"id":41515,"date":"2011-11-15T11:50:28","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T16:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=41515"},"modified":"2012-01-08T14:44:19","modified_gmt":"2012-01-08T19:44:19","slug":"abstract-preferences-and-real-choices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/11\/15\/abstract-preferences-and-real-choices\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstract Preferences and Real Choices"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Cross-posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/2011\/11\/abstract-preferences-and-real-choices.html\" target=\"_blank\">Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve known for a long time that surveys are often very bad at predicting behavior.\u00a0 To take the example that\u00a0 Malcom Gladwell uses, if you ask Americans what kind of coffee they want,\u00a0 most will say \u201ca dark, rich, hearty roast.\u201d\u00a0 But what they actually prefer to drink is \u201cmilky, weak coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Something that sounds good in the abstract turnsout to be different from the stuff you actually have to drink.<\/p>\n<p>Election polls usually have better luck since indicating your choice to a voting machine isn\u2019t all that different from speaking that choice to a pollster.\u00a0 But political preference polls as well can run into that abstract-vs.-actual problem.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/epolls\/2012\/president\/president_obama_vs_republican_candidates.html\">Real Clear Politics<\/a> recently printed some poll results that were anything but real clear.\u00a0 RCP looked at polls matching Obama against the various Republican candidates.\u00a0 In every case, if you use the average results of the different polls, Obama comes out on top. But in polls that matched Obama against \u201ca Republican,\u201d the Republican wins.<\/p>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-xwT4haNY_2w\/TrKIhoMzZTI\/AAAAAAAAC00\/aOqxfYNdVq0\/s1600\/00+Obama+GOP.jpg\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-xwT4haNY_2w\/TrKIhoMzZTI\/AAAAAAAAC00\/aOqxfYNdVq0\/s320\/00+Obama+GOP.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"323\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><em>T<\/em>he graph shows only the average of the polls.\u00a0 RCP also provides the results\u00a0of the various polls (CNN, Rasmussen, ABCl, etc.)<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, the best strategy for the GOP is nominate a candidate but not tell anyone who it is.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. We\u2019ve known for a long time that surveys are often very bad at predicting behavior.\u00a0 To take the example that\u00a0 Malcom Gladwell uses, if you ask Americans what kind of coffee they want,\u00a0 most will say \u201ca dark, rich, hearty roast.\u201d\u00a0 But what they actually prefer to drink is \u201cmilky, weak [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[85,8121,693],"class_list":["post-41515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-politics","tag-election-2012","tag-public-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41515"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41520,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41515\/revisions\/41520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}