50% of people think that half the population disagree with them

Surveys - arntcha sick of them?!!? I'm not trying to compete with Glenda Slagg but could think of no better opening. There's just so many column inches and broadcast minutes to fill these days that most editors resort to the desperate measure of saying to some hapless intern "get on the blower Toby and ask some punters whether they believe in fairies then churn out 1,000 words on the results. It'll get mentioned on the radio by someone like Steve Wright and we'll go viral!" Or with any luck, go down with a virus.

Today's version of this scenario is a headline along the lines of "50% of women believe sex discrimination is alive and well in the workplace." Which means of course, that 50% of women don't believe this, never mind if someone's "belief" actually accords with reality. This is actually an example of  a new game I've invented in which you derive the alternative inference from the one in the headline. You usually find that this is much more instructive. But of course it's usually much less provocative and makes worse copy. 

There's examples of this on a daily basis....keep your eyes open. There is a serious point though which is that our opinions are shaped by these sort of soundbites and people often don't have the time or inclination to delve beyond the headline. So the idea takes root that most workplaces are a vipers' nest of seething sexism...or that fairies really do exist (even if young Toby's survey unearthed only a couple of cranks, a headline of "20% of people believe in fairies!" would probably do the trick) or whatever.

The manipulation of the public's opinion on fairies may not be terribly important but back in the 1990s, the masterminds of the New Labour "project" realised that voting intentions could be altered in this way: what matters is not what governments do but what people think they do. OK so there's nothing very new in government propaganda but we in Britain are a fundamentally honest bunch who imagine that the propaganda machine only really revs up in wartime and that the rest of the time, we can believe most of what we're told. In its defence, HMG (of whatever hue) would claim it doesn't actually spout lies but it does help people to deceive themselves. And empolys armies of people to help them do it. And guess what? You pay for it! Great!

It's long been well-known that you can get almost any answer you like to a survey if you phrase the question the right way. I often wonder whether we would have a Scottish parliament, never mind the talk now of complete devolution, had the referendum in question been phrased along the lines of "would you like more of you income to be spent on the salaries of politicians and bureaucrats, rather than on holidays/cars/booze/fags?" Which self-respecting Scot could say "yes" to that?

So - think. Think beyond the headlines. Be wary of any story which starts "x% of people think...." and always realise it implies that y% of people don't think. Be very wary of graphs - in fact best not to look at them at all - whole books have been written on "how to deceive people with graphs".  Remember, you don't know what the rate of inflation or the level of unemployemt is: you only know what you're told and what you're told may not be as accurate as you might think. And if you get a phone call from a nice young chap called Toby, just say no.