You don’t have to look at survey data to find social desirability bias. The Emperor’s New Clothes, a 1837 folktale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, tells the story of a vain Emperor who believes his magical clothes are visible only to the worthy. Everyone, including the Emperor, pretends to see the clothes to avoid appearing unfit, until a child innocently points out the Emperor is naked.
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The government only knows how many people are working because of the ONS Labour Force study, a monthly survey that asks thousands of individuals about their employment status. But declining survey response rates means there are now serious questions about data accuracy. We now face a remarkable situation where Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, says he wishes he “knew more exactly what our unemployment number was in the UK.”
You wouldn’t pay much for empty space, unless of course it’s a groundbreaking work of art. A European collector recently paid $1.2 million for Yves Klein’s ‘Zone of Empty Space’ – not bad for something invisible.
In the early 2000s, head coach Clive Woodward made England the first team to wear skin tight kit, believing that baggy shirts make it easier to be tackled. A small – and perhaps vital – factor in the team’s 2003 World Cup win.
Most people say they care about the environment, but that doesn’t mean they act on it. According to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, just 1% of his airline’s passengers pay to offset their emissions. As he says, “people want low fare air travel, and people want somebody else to pay the environmental taxation.”
When asked about the symbolism in his novella ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, Ernest Hemingway simply said this: “Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.”
The foam that forms on top of espresso was originally called ‘scum’, and was thought to be a bad byproduct of making coffee. So manufacturer Gaggia marketed it as ‘crema’ to make it sound more desirable.
Demographics are useful when used correctly, but they’re often too vague to be meaningful. A simple ‘Asian’ grouping misses key nuances in the political sphere, like the fact that Chinese voters are significantly more likely than Bangladeshi voters to value low taxes.
According to EU law, all members must keep their budget deficit to within 3% of GDP. You’d think this was based on sophisticated modelling and forecasting, but actually Guy Abeille, then a senior Budget Ministry official, came up with the figure in less than an hour. As he explains, he needed “an easy rule that he could deploy in his discussions with ministers who kept coming into his office to demand money.” And luckily for him the number 3 was “somewhat reminiscent of the Trinity.”
With 3 billion users, almost half the planet is on Facebook. But its original target audience was very niche: it exclusively targeted Harvard students, before slowly expanding to other colleges across the US.
According to the head of policy at human rights organisation Liberty, facial recognition is a “deeply invasive breach of our privacy rights” when it’s used by the police. But billions of people use it to unlock their smartphones every day.
Political disinformation is frequently blamed for election results, but its impact is highly concentrated. Researchers examined Twitter behaviour during the 2016 US election and concluded that “only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures… who were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news.” Basically, fake news reached a tiny minority of users, most of whom probably had their minds made up before going on Twitter.
A fear of heights doesn’t just change our emotions – it changes our perceptions. People who are scared of heights will, quite literally, see the same height as larger than those who aren’t.
Not all labels are positive. Only 19% of the public identify as feminists, but 81% believe women should be treated as equal in every way.
Ferrari is worth $90 billion, and the most valuable car company in Europe, precisely because it makes the product hard to buy. When Ferrari revealed its new $3.7 million ‘hypercar’ in 2024, it announced it wouldn’t be available for sale. Instead, it promised the car to a select group of 800 dedicated customers who already owned a Ferrari (note: the company only sells 14,000 per year).