Mind-reading a friend: A better way to ask the polling question?

This article reports on differences observed when asking a simple polling question in a traditional way—that is, asking respondents for predictions about their own voting behavior versus asking respondents for predictions about a friend's voting behavior.

Introduction

I wanted to use the 2017 UK general election to test an intuition, that instead of asking people for predictions about their own future behavior, we might be better off asking them to predict the future behavior of a friend. In short, I had a hunch that we might know the minds of others better than we know our own! Why? The behavioral sciences tells us, variously, that we can be unreliable witnesses to our motivations,1 that we can be over-confident in our ability to stick to intentions,2that we are naturally expert at observing other...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands