Why Audiences Say They Like Vegetables But Eat Candy

A recent survey by a coalition of Canadian international development organizations found that 94% of Canadians say it is “important to improve health, education and economic opportunity for the world’s poorest people.”

I'm sure they feel that way. Who wouldn’t? It would be a very mean-spirited and Grinch-like person who says the world’s poor shouldn't be able to improve their lives.

The aid groups that created the survey might think this proves to government that it should increase foreign aid spending. The public wants it!

But it really proves no such thing. At best, the question only tests aspirations, not what they really believe or do.

In the world of polling, questions like this are known as a halo or angel question. That is, people answer with what they think or believe they should say—the thing they aspire to.

There’s nothing wrong with aspirations; we all should have them. But they only measure what people think they should do. They don’t measure what they actually do.

A good follow up question would be: And when was the last time you donated to help poor people improve their health, education and economic opportunity? 

That would provide better data for making decisions.

For non-profit groups, asking good questions is key when doing surveys about giving. It is also helpful when doing surveys about communication.

We want to know: What do people want to read in our newsletters and websites? The challenge is that people will tell you one thing, but do another.

This is something the media is discovering, sometimes to its chagrin.

For decades, it was hard for TV, radio and newspapers to know what kind of news audiences actually watched, listened to or read.

In focus groups and TV and radio measurement books, people reported that they liked hard news about the world. But who could tell if they were really telling the truth?

Then the Web came along. Now the media knows exactly what people pay attention by counting what they click on.

It’s not the result they hoped for.

Intuitively, editors and news directors knew that international news ranked lower than, say, horoscopes and celebrity gossip. But by counting the clicks they now know how much lower it is.

Last year, BuzzFeed released a review of traffic to sites within its partner network, including the New York Times and The Atlantic. Of the 20 most viral stories across those sites, just three dealt with recent news events.

What was in the top most shared items? Quizzes, lists, and emotional poppers. Iraq, Afghanistan and the economy—three important topics—didn’t rank high at all.

In an article in Atlantic Online, titled "Why Audiences Hate Hard News and Love Pretending Otherwise," Derek Thompson put it this way: "Ask readers what they want to eat, and they'll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they'll mostly eat candy."

Audiences, he went on to say, "are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes.”

The culprit isn't Millennials, or even Facebook. This challenge has existed for a long time.

According to Thompson, it’s about something psychologists call fluency.

“Fluency isn't how we think: It's how we feel while we're thinking,” he wrote.

“We prefer thoughts that come easily: Faces that are symmetrical, colours that are clear, and sentences with parallelisms."

For hard news, fluency creates two problems: "It's hard and it's new.”

(Fluency also explains why most liberals prefer to read and watch liberal-oriented media, while conservatives prefer to read and watch conservative-oriented media—because it easier to read something that bolsters your conviction thatn something that challenges it.)

Now that the media is able to precisely determine what people pay attention to—before there were eyeballs on our eyeballs—it was hard for them to know exactly what we were doing.

But now the media knows. And what they know, as Thompson put it, is that “readers lie.”

This is something to keep in mind the next time someone produces a survey saying that a majority of people feel one way or another about your cause or issue—so put more hard and detailed articles on your website.

People may, in fact, believe they should show read those kind of articles. But when it comes to what's real, your web analytics will tell the truth: Most prefer candy.

Read Thompson's full article here.