From the Pop!Tech 2004 conference over at IT Conversations,
in the Q&A with Joel Garreau and Malcom Gladwell, Frans de Waal has this riff on the value of questionaires in social science (around minute 45 from this mp3):
in the Q&A with Joel Garreau and Malcom Gladwell, Frans de Waal has this riff on the value of questionaires in social science (around minute 45 from this mp3):
We should never trust questionaires at all ... There’s another experiment ... Let me tell you of another experiment, this is on sexual preferences of males and females on college campuses. If you ask young men how many sex partners do you have, let’s say, whatever, they say ten. If you ask women, how many do you have, or whatever it is, they say five, it's always half of what the men have, which is very puzzling, because [laughter] ... there must be something going on. And then recently an experiment was done by a group of psychologists where they hooked them up to fake lie detector tests, not a real lie detector machine, but a fake one, with all sorts of tubes and graphs and all of this, and all the sudden the women had as many partners as the men.
And so I usually use it as an example I don’t trust questionaires at all ... you need to pay attention to behavior, behavior is the only thing that tells us what the real preferences are.
HedgeFundGuy - am 2006-04-24 20:25