I was looking at some of
the poll responses from members of the public this morning on the news, and
thought to myself, the way pollsters poll seems to me to be not the most
effective way to gauge the likelihood of a party's share of the vote.
Think about it, the
pollsters ask members of the public who they are going to vote for, which is a
very limited question because the only information they distil from that
question is how that person will vote.
Now, a better question to
ask members of the public would be: Which party do you think is going to win
the election?
Here's why. When you ask
someone who they think will be win the election, their brain will rapidly run a
gamut of recall in their mind's library of experiential protocols - sifting
through all their recent political conversations, family voting intentions,
Facebook posts from friends revealing their party preferences, etc, and draw on
a kind of weighted average of those experiences, thereby being able to intuit
who they think the likely winning party will be.
That is to say, in asking
someone Which party do you think is going
to win the election? - as opposed to Who
will you vote for? - the pollsters are, in essence, capturing a proxy poll
of a much wider part of the demographic, because they are extrapolating from
the person's wider social circle. Asking someone Which party do you think is going to win the election? is a little bit like asking them about the voting intentions of their social circle - it's a kind of larger poll trapped inside the body of a smaller poll.
In a sense, the phenomenon I'm talking about is a development of what's known as The Wisdom of Crowds, which is where the average guess of a large selection of guesses usually turns out to be astonishingly close to the correct answer.
This Wisdom of Crowds phenomenon
famously came about through scientist Francis Galton (he of eugenics infamy)
when he conducted an impromptu experiment at a farmyard exhibition, whereby
people were asked to guess the weight of an ox, with a prize being awarded to
the person who made the best guess. There were just under 800 guesses, with the
average guess being within 1% of the correct answer 1,197 pounds, beating not
only most of the individual guesses but also those of alleged cattle experts.
This is what is meant by The Wisdom of Crowds.
To qualify that, three
things: firstly, it is important that the group members give their answers
independently without being influenced by each other; secondly, this works much
better if the group has diversity - the more diverse the better; and thirdly,
this also works better when there is a correct answer to the question that's
easy to ascertain.
Given the foregoing, why,
then, should the average of a large selection of guesses by non-experts
consistently be more accurate than more educated guesses by individual experts?
I think the probable explanation is that when an individual makes a guess or
posits an answer, he or she is cluttered with quite a bit of background
distraction from the variety of other thoughts, feelings and sensations, and that
taking the average over a huge variety of responses may go some way to
cancelling out this effect.
In November last year I
wrote a Blog explaining why polls
keep misleading the masses, and I touched on something that I think is
heart of what I'm on about today. I
talked about what I felt was good intuition regarding the outcome of the last
three big political events (UK Election in 2015, EU Referendum and US
Presidential Election). I felt confident about the results quite simply because
everywhere I went - be it at work, in pubs, on the Internet - the sense was
that there were more people trusting Cameron than Ed Miliband, more people wanting to
leave the EU than remain in it, and enough people trusting Trump and/or disking Hillary Clinton to see
Trump become President.
Similarly, I think polls that
gauged this type of intuition by asking Who
do you think is going to win? are the way forward if you want to achieve a
much more accurate reading of the electorate's pulse on these matters.
