Choiceology With Dan Heath

If you ran a survey at a science fiction convention to find out which movies were most popular with the general public, chances are good that the results would lean heavily towards sci-fi films. This skewing of data is plain to see in this context, but in many others it’s less obvious and potentially more pernicious.In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we look at a bias that can distort information that we gather from the world around us.First, W. Joseph Campbell tells the story of the infamous Literary Digest election poll of 1936. The publication had correctly predicted several presidential elections in the 1920s and '30s and was considered the most reputable pollster of its day. They sent millions of surveys to people across the United States in advance of the 1936 election. But this time, their predictions couldn’t have been further from the results.W. Joseph Campbell is a professor of communications at American University and author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential E