It's All We Know

There are surveys and questionnaires given to people all the time so researchers could get a better understanding of what it is people want and like. The more information we have and get, the easier it is to make decisions based on that, right? So you would think. However, I think the more information you have, the harder it is to analyze and really get the gist of it what it is you really have. Researchers do test all the time. What I find very interesting is how some researchers know their subjects are confronted with clearly differentiated alternatives before they take certain test or take different surveys. I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, over the summer. In it, he talked about trying to get certain ideas and images in participants’ heads before taking a test or survey. For example, some of the subjects watched negative videos and listened to negative words, while other subjects watched positive videos and listened to positive words. This impacts the way people think and make decisions because of what the last thing they were thinking about was. And what makes people associate certain ideas with other ideas is previous data as well. Data and statistics, the numbers, are proof and sometimes that’s all people need to believe something and that always impacts the way people make decisions.

In one of my classes we looked at a lot of data and statistics about racism. When I look at things like residential segregation, class inequality, and occupational stratification there is an enormous amount of data about these things and a lot of times, they’re one-sided. For example, blacks tend to live in poor neighborhoods so when we pass by a poor neighborhood and see blacks, it seems normal. We seem the same patterns in this world and we’ve learned accept them because to us, that’s just the way the world works. What we read, hear, or learn from experience is what we tend to believe because that’s what we know and at the end of the day everything goes back to the data analysis that researchers come up with.


http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=628027