We have a new study out!
The short version is this: "Car Brain" - the cultural blind spot that makes people apply double standards when they think about driving - is real, measurable and pervasive.
Read on for more details... 1/14 @SwanseaUni@twitter.com @UWEBristol@twitter.com @EdNapierTRI@twitter.com
This work was carried out with top-class humans @AlanTapp@twitter.com and @Adrian4Davis@twitter.com. We did something deliberately very simple: we had an independent polling agency contact a representative sample of 2157 people across the UK and ask them five questions 2/14
Randomly, people either got questions about driving or they got the same set of questions with a couple of words changed so that they asked exactly the same things, but not about driving 3/14
@ianwalker If I'm understanding correctly, everybody got either 5 driving questions or 5 non-driving questions, and the randomization between 'driving' and 'non-driving' was on a per-set basis and not a per-question basis?
That seems to me like it could skew the results - 5 driving questions would be obviously related, whereas 5 non-driving questions would not be, which could change the answering patterns of the "driving" respondents and might eg. make them respond more defensively.
(I'm not sure whether this would really affect the conclusion, though.)
@joepie91 Possibly. However, from memory I think our questions were intermixed among other questions that the polling org was asking on the same day, so even in worst-case scenario this should have reduced any effect. But tbh I'm not that concerned - the goal above all was simply to make the point that these biases exist, thereby allowing us to write the (more interesting?) stuff in the rest of the paper
@ianwalker Ah yeah, if it got intermixed with other questions, then it wouldn't be such an issue. Curious how you decided on per-set randomization and not per-question randomization, though - was there a specific reason for that?
@joepie91 Have you TRIED working with polling companies? ;)
@ianwalker I have not! Hence my curiosity :)
@ianwalker (I do plan on working with polling companies at some point in the future for activism reasons, hence my interest in the oddities of the process!)