Social Desirability Bias
April 12, 2023
By NZB3
How to explain ‘Woke Capital’ or ‘The Wokeforce’ as I also like to call it? Why are famous brands sidling up to Woke ‘Current Thing’ values to sell more doodads? For example, Jack Daniels and Bud beer in the States are re-branding to be more Drag Queen friendly. It seems so self-destructive that my mate Mike even entertains the belief that this is a deliberate infiltration by a rival firm to bring down their competition from within! I have a more simple explanation for the phenomena. Ref. “Lot of people are going to cut back on alcohol”: Jack Daniels Drag Queen Summer Camp surfaces amid Bud Light ad controversy, Sportskeeda
Woke isn’t your brand or mine either but it is for the current mainstream.
A company, eg. Jack Daniels, eg Countdown supermarket, isn’t woke itself. Branding is just an attempt to mirror what the company thinks people want to hear so it will buy more doodads from them.
Check out this Anarkiwi post from 2021: “Progressive Enterprises gave the keys to their Countdown kingdom to Kiri Hannifin and boy did she put her dark arts to work! Every Woke thing that was popular, as it became popular and before the public even knew it was popular, was being fronted by Kiri Hannifin and her team.” Ref. Countdown Kiri Takes Knives Away, NZB3 (2019)
The Wokeforce pay big bucks to people like Kiri here to steer their ship deliberately on the SJW Ocean. It’s calculated carefully based on what they understand the voters/customer wants to hear in order that they buy more doodads.
Countdown Kiri is paid good money for being a Priest of Woke. When the culture changes she’ll have to adapt or be given the boot for someone who can re-brand to the Next Thing. Even if the Next Thing is patriotic conservatism and anti-jab it will not show they have integrity only that they, as always, follow the money.
Where are firms they getting this belief from though? Where’s the data coming from to tell them to Go Woke?
Answer: Market Research. The same market research that told them Clinton would beat trump and that Brexit would fail. Turns out that our Revealed Preferences are not the same as what we feel safe in admitting to others even over the phone. So the majority don’t actually like Woke or even mass vaccinations but we will go along with it in our shopping choices anyway. We get the jab. We buy the doodad. That’s all the Wokeforce wants of us. Dollars not hearts and minds.
I suggest that Social Desirability Bias indicated one thing to the polls but another when it came to the Revealed Preferences about Brexit and Trump 2016.
But when you’re in public buying things the SDB kicks in. “People are watching me. I’d better buy the Woke Whisky or be seen not to be buying the Racist Beer!”
Do people really want that product? Doesn’t matter. If they’re buying it because of SDB their money is just as good and that’s what Countdown Kiri delivers. The Nomad Generation (Gen X) has the trait of being quite high in Agreeableness so our Social Desirability Bias is quite pronounced.
“Counter-intuitively, this is a reminder that it is not the role of firms to generate and police public opinion. They must surf the wave by figuring out what the customer wants and reflecting it back successfully in their branding. Asking firms (including political parties) to take a stand or to stop being Politically Correct is to misunderstand their relationship to us. ” – Eagle Brewing Brouhaha, NZB3 (2021)
“Social desirability bias: This refers to the tendency of individuals to respond to poll questions in a way that they perceive as socially acceptable or desirable, rather than expressing their true opinions. People may be hesitant to admit certain beliefs or preferences that they think may be frowned upon by others or go against social norms, resulting in a bias in poll results.”
“Shy Tory effect or Shy Trump effect: These terms specifically refer to the tendency of conservative or right-leaning voters to underreport their true voting intentions in polls, leading to inaccurate predictions. This phenomenon is thought to occur because some conservative voters may feel stigmatized or face social repercussions for expressing their political beliefs, leading them to be “shy” or reluctant to openly disclose their true voting intentions in polls.”
“In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others” – Social Desirability Bias, Wiki
Boomers and Millennials are very demanding about what they want or do not want. Whereas the Swing Vote of the GenX will just go along to get along. And so here we are. So GenX buys the doodad too. If you check the Social Media ‘barometer’ of comments you will frequently find those comments threads shut down. A Woke ‘news’ story is frequently stormed by people who hate what they are reading and don’t believe the lies of the Mainstream Media and from behind their keyboards they don’t mind saying so. That’s some true Revealed Preference there of the sort you will not find people willing to self-express in public streets or even at the supermarket where the SBD kicks in.
A Social Bias Thought Experiment
In 1871 New Zealand had its first Secret Ballot General Election. It was something the old 1830s Chartist Generation Lefties long wanted because it would institutionally skew election results their way. This was moving our country toward a different kind of New Zealand where our political views were kept from one another, the more easy to manipulate them by politicians. The calculation in this case was that more people would vote shamefully (ie Left) if their shame were made secret. A Secret Ballot was to the advantage of the the most shameful government ever and led to the Vogel Boom and resulting Long Depression. Ref. Vogal Administers Steroids, AHNZ
Now suppose that the COVID Jab were administered by Secret Ballot.
Let’s say everyone turned up as they do on election days and entered a private, secret, booth. After a disclosure video by Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield each participant would then get to vote. Instead of voting for Blue or Red or Yellow etc. you would vote for JAB or NO JAB. It would be secret.
You extend your arm into a partition like some Catholic confession box if you want the JAB. Or, some mechanical arm comes and shoots you up with the experimental treatment if that’s what you wish. The mechanics of this don’t matter because this is a thought experiment. Nobody would know your choice and you would exit the booth having made your own secret choice.
What do you think New Zealanders would ‘vote’ for?
We exit the re-purposed polling places and nobody gets to ask which treatment we voted for. If they do you tell them that’s private. That’s my business. It would be as unnatural and unconstitutional to demand to know if someone took the JAB as demanding to know which political party a voter tried to have elected.
Nobody would be discriminated against or lose their jobs for not voting for JAB. It would be recorded that they presented themselves in the booth and made a private, secret, choice. And that would be enough.
I predict that tens of thousands of New Zealanders would simply show up to such a booth to keep their jobs and retain their ‘Social Desirability’ credentials. They would show up for that and select NO JAB. Because the part of the bundle they really want is the Social Desirability credentials not the part where they get a needle in the arm. Of course it was never offered to New Zealanders this way, Unbundled. If you want to conform and be socially desirable you had to also vote JAB.
It would be a bit like Australia where voting is compulsory but how you vote is not. That’s fairly bad but not so bad as being also forced how to vote or else.
Like the 1871 Secret Ballot manipulated New Zealanders, I suggest the Public JAB was deliberately instituted to favor the politician’s desired result. We studied this at university in my Public Choice economics class; By rejigging the rules of a system you can get any result you like even when the economic agents are ‘free to choose.’
If buying Jack Daniels or shopping at the supermarket were secret then none of this Woke Capital would fly according to the predicted outcome of this thought experiment. Of course the solution to run-away Woke is not to protect the meek using laws and secrets. That would only shelter and subsidise our pathological Agreeableness.
What we need is to be more Self-Expressed about what we really think. I think that later this decade we will be very Self-Expressed and Self-Confident in our core values because they would have been honed in reaction to Wokism. All strong cultures are born and re-born that way. It seems that Western Culture needs to replenish itself and its self-identity by periodically letting the lunatics take over the asylum until things get so bad that Kipling’s Awakened Saxon rises again from his slumber.
—
The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon,” Rudyard Kipling
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