Beware of the Public Opinion Poll

The opinion poll has long been a curious counterpart to American democracy. But it's usage in the Internet-age may be hindering our ability to opine for ourselves.

In the early days, the “straw poll” was an impromptu affair, practiced by local newspapermen as voters left the polling booths. Gradually, with the rise of the social sciences and the development of modern sampling techniques by professionals like George Gallup, the poll has become a key element in American political coverage.

While the ideological underpinnings of polling are innocuous enough—to report and measure public opinion—some have started to question whether polling's constant presence in political coverage hasn’t started to diminish our capacity for independent thinking.

As Conor Clark argues recently in The Atlantic, poll-testing has three fundamental and potentially hazardous flaws. First, its may lead to too much democracy, as waiting for and incessantly debating the input of the citizenry leads to legislative inertia and severely hampers governmental effectiveness. Second, these polls are laden with inaccuracies and vagaries that make their legitimacy tenuous at best. Third, and perhaps most important, being continually confronted with these figures can have deleterious effects on one’s critical faculties.

The prevalence of political polling reached its apotheosis in our most recent general election as each day brought in myriad—and often contradictory—reports on the candidates’ standings. Not only were there floods of websites minted to host these reports, but many of the debates were televised with graphs illustrating undecided voters' real-time thoughts on the candidates’ responses.

While innovations like real-time polling may be a way to, as some say, “hack into politics” it's also reason to be hesitant about their place in public debate, as recent research suggests that streaming crowd responses can powerfully influence viewers’ perceptions of candidates.

If, as common sense, current research and a variety of social theorists suggest, being oversaturated with awareness of public opinions makes us less likely to form our own, some sort of check on polling practices may have to be instituted to ensure that our fascination with public opinion doesn’t lead to the demise of the American ideal of individual opinion.