The Art of Asking Questions—Asterisk

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Everyone seems to agree that self-report questions are fraught with lies, biases, errors, and other inaccuracies. We all use them anyway. How can we ask them better? It was 2016, and Professor Tony Greenwald was peering into the future. It was a heady time for election prognostication: FiveThirtyEight was in its prime, the New York Times had begun revving up its “election needle,” and Princeton’s neuroscientist-cum-forecaster Sam Wang, after cramming every poll into a mathematical model, claimed he would eat a bug if his predictions were wrong. But Greenwald wasn’t satisfied with these traditional prediction methods. Pollsters collect data about voter preferences by asking people a series of questions. First, they try to measure how likely the respondent is to vote: “How much thought have you given to the upcoming election?,” “Do you happen to know where people in your neighborhood go to vote?,” “Did you vote in the last election?,” etc. Then they ask about which candidate the respond

The Art of Asking Questions—Asterisk Everyone seems to agree that self-report questions are fraught with lies, biases, errors, and other inaccuracies. We all use them anyway. How can we ask them better? It was 2016, and Professor Tony Greenwald was peering into the future. It was a heady time for election prognostication: FiveThirtyEight was in its prime, the New York Times had begun revving up its “election needle,” and Princeton’s neuroscientist-cum-forecaster Sam Wang, after cramming every poll into a mathematical model, claimed he would eat a bug if his predictions were wrong. But Greenwal

The Art of Asking Questions—Asterisk

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