Thread by @danbarker

You've probably seen tweets about a YouGov survey which says 'almost half of Britons have little to no sympathy' for 'the migrants' crossing the channel.

On the left is one of the tweets, and on the right is how YouGov presented it.

It is worth looking a bit deeper...

As background, you will know that many people have trouble feeling empathy for large groups.

This is one of the reasons that charity campaigns use images of individuals rather than groups.

It is why the image on the left feels somehow more harrowing than the image on the right.

You will also know that there is occasionally debate over the words 'migrant', 'refugee', and 'asylum seeker', and that in this case YouGov have chosen to ask about 'the migrants'.

Maybe this wording & the 'group empathy' issue make a difference, maybe they does not.

Here is a breakdown of the actual question, and the actual results, plus a bit on 2 habits that YouGov have fallen into when writing questions, and when presenting their data on Twitter:

Habit 1: YouGov group responses when they present data on Twitter. They've done that here:

"Almost half of Britons (49%) say they have little (22%) to no sympathy (27%)"

Ie, they've grouped people with 'no sympathy', & those with 'a little' sympathy to create a bigger number.

If you group those two phrases, it means something different to each part.

If you say: "I have little to no sympathy", some will essentially read that as "no sympathy".

But actually 45% of that "little to no sympathy" group deliberately avoided saying they have "no sympathy".

Habit 2: Here's the actual question wording. Read it & pay attention to this phrase: "if any at all".

YouGov often use it, I believe thinking it avoids giving the question a positive slant. But reading it over, you may actually feel 'if any at all' gives this a negative slant:

Here are the actual answers. Worth reading carefully again & thinking how people you know would decide how to answer.

19% have 'a great deal' of sympathy.
25% have 'a fair amount' of sympathy.
22% have 'not much' sympathy.
27% have 'no sympathy at all'.
7% don't know.

The first 2 options there are 'a great deal of sympathy' and 'a fair amount of sympathy'.

Note: If I tell you there's 'a fair amount of work to be done', or someone earns 'a fair amount of money', do you read that as 'some', or 'a considerable amount'?

Some readers will see the 'a great deal' and the 'a fair amount' options as basically near variants of 'a lot', one a bit more than the other.

Maybe you agree that they are variants of 'a lot', but even if you don't, you can probably see that some readers will.

If someone is in that category of seeing those both as variants of 'a lot', that basically narrows the answers closer to 3 options than 4 option (+ 'don't know'):

a) a lot. (a great deal / a fair amount)
b) not much.
c) none.

So if you're at the 'lots of sympathy' end of the spectrum, you pick one of the 'a lot' variants.

If you're at the 'zero sympathy' end of the spectrum, you pick 'no sympathy at all'.

(Also bearing in mind this is simply a YouGov daily survey, with no real life ramifications)

If your opinion has some sort of nuance - eg,

- "if they genuinely deserve asylum, of course, but many do not"
- "I feel sympathy for some but not all"
- "we need to stop them from risking such danger"

Your only choices are:

'a fair amount of sympathy'
'not much sympathy'

As we've covered, 'a fair amount' can be read as 'a lot'.

If your opinion is nuanced, you may not want to select something that may be read as 'a lot of sympathy'.

You also do not want to select 'no sympathy', because you do have some.

Ie: some may answer "Not much sympathy", basically they genuinely do not have much sympathy.

BUT others may answer that because it is the only option from a very limited set that can be read as "my opinion is nuanced", or "I have sympathy with some but not others".

And so, in the way that YouGov represent their surveys on Twitter, the opinions of those 696 people who may simply actually be saying "my opinion is more nuanced than your survey allows" are dropped into a headline that reads "49% have little to no sympathy".