Agreed. As I mentioned in this comment, people will tend to be inclined to agree with any generally positive sounding platitude, due to acquiescence bias and plausibly social desirability bias. On the whole, I would expect people to be extremely reluctant to explicitly deny that some people “matter just as much as” as others if the affirmative is put to them. This all may especially be a problem when the issues in question are ones people haven’t really thought about before and so don’t have clear attitudes- this will be particularly likely to elicit just superficial agreement.
I think one of the best approaches to ameliorate this is to use reversed statements i.e. ask people whether they agree with an item expressing the opposite attitude (i.e. that people who are alive here and now matter more). Sanjay should be posting a report of the results when we did this fairly soon. Quite often you will find that people will agree with statements expressing both an attitude and a statement designed to capture the exact opposite view, and you then need to work to find a set of items that together actually seems to meaningfully capture the attitude of interest.
Thanks for the suggestion to use reversed statements. As I said in my response to Larks, I share this concern, so if we run further iterations of the survey, I’ll include something along these lines.
Agreed. As I mentioned in this comment, people will tend to be inclined to agree with any generally positive sounding platitude, due to acquiescence bias and plausibly social desirability bias. On the whole, I would expect people to be extremely reluctant to explicitly deny that some people “matter just as much as” as others if the affirmative is put to them. This all may especially be a problem when the issues in question are ones people haven’t really thought about before and so don’t have clear attitudes- this will be particularly likely to elicit just superficial agreement.
I think one of the best approaches to ameliorate this is to use reversed statements i.e. ask people whether they agree with an item expressing the opposite attitude (i.e. that people who are alive here and now matter more). Sanjay should be posting a report of the results when we did this fairly soon. Quite often you will find that people will agree with statements expressing both an attitude and a statement designed to capture the exact opposite view, and you then need to work to find a set of items that together actually seems to meaningfully capture the attitude of interest.
Thanks for the suggestion to use reversed statements. As I said in my response to Larks, I share this concern, so if we run further iterations of the survey, I’ll include something along these lines.
I look forward to seeing Sanjay’s report!