I refuse to participate in opinion polls. I answer some surveys, like the little questionnaires I get about whether a call center employee’s help was satisfactory. Surveys like that can be very important to the employee they concern. It’s important to answer them honestly, particularly if I have something good to say. On the other hand, I don’t like to answer polls about consumer products. I see no reason to donate my time to help them improve their product. But if you want to donate your time to help McDonalds or CBS I’m not going to ask you to stop, it’s your time. No, the polls that I really object to are the ones that ask about my political views, or my values, or whatever, and then publish them in the newspaper or a magazine or on TV. Those are the polls that damage society.

If you work in the news industry or in politics you probably think I’m crazy. You probably think that opinion polls are wonderful things. You can go find out everyone’s views on the latest hot topic then turn around and tell them what they think. It’s great business. Everyone likes to hear about themselves, so a good opinion poll can generate news cycle after news cycle. You get to hammer the public again and again and again with poll after poll, letting them know what they think about their elected officials, current events, or the possibility of life on Mars.

It’s no wonder people’s minds turn to jelly.

If you care enough to try (and lets assume that you do) getting opinion polling right is very hard. First you’ve got to decide who is going to answer your questions. This is tricky because your choice has got to be totally random or the mathematical magic that ensures that the views of your small group are like the views of everyone else doesn’t work. In fact, pollsters are getting worried about this because more and more people are giving up their land line based telephone in favor of a cell phone. People who’ve given up land lines don’t necessarily have the same views as those who haven’t, so if enough people switch current polling techniques aren’t going to work. No one’s sure yet what to do if that happens, but I’m confident they’ll figure something out. If the solution isn’t perfect, that’s okay, it’ll be good enough. Polling is big business.

A more subtle and difficult problem is the wording of the question. Admittedly, there’s nothing subtle about push polling, where a “poll” is taken solely to change the views of those polled. But a poll doesn’t have to be an attack add dressed up as a series of questions in order to give the results a particular bias. Poll takers say that questions must be worded in a clear and neutral way. That’s true. But putting it that way makes it seem easier than it is. Even the experts can get this one badly wrong. Something as minor as the order in which questions are asked can affect the outcome of the poll. And let’s say you do get it wrong, how would you know? Maybe you’d wonder if the results were surprising in some way, but otherwise you’d never suspect. And even if you did know, all you could do is give the poll again. Hopefully you get it right the second time around, or at least get it wrong in a new and different way. Otherwise you’d have to conclude that you had it right in the first place. The only way to verify a poll is another poll.

But what about when you tell everyone about the results of the first poll before you give the second one? Does knowing what all your friends believe have an effect on what you believe? How about knowing what the rest of the country believes? Maybe if you’ve thought a great deal about an issue you’re not going to change your mind, but what about the rest of the time? If you’re a grump like me you probably enjoy thinking that you’re better than everyone else, so you’ll try hard to find reasons not to believe what others believe. If you’re not quite such a grump you may be free of that particular foible, but that doesn’t mean you make up your mind in a vacuum. Maybe you’re a nicer guy, and tend to the reasonable view that if everyone else believes something chances are good that it’s true. Regardless of how it affects you, only a fool would think that knowing what all your friends believe would have no impact on what you believe.

Yet that’s exactly the assumption behind the business of opinion polling. As far as polling organizations are concerned opinions are a cash crop and people are merely the vegetable matter that produces them. (And politics is… never mind.) But what makes the poll results valuable, at least in theory, is that they are discovering something previously unknown. If opinion polls aren’t pulling something real and meaningful out of the collective psyche why should anyone be interested in what they have to say? But if what they’re collecting consists in part of the echoes of previous opinion polls what’s the point? Even if there were real data buried in there somewhere there how could you ever separate it out?

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe polls do influence what people believe. So subsequent polls are picking that effect up along with anything else that may have affected the public’s thinking in the last few days. So what? That doesn’t invalidate polls if you’re an intelligent consumer of polling information. After all, people are thinking it. Maybe it’s partly because of the latest poll, but it could also be the latest scandal. It doesn’t matter whether it’s either of those or something else. It still influences that holy relic of democracy, the vote.

And that’s quite true. After all, it’s not as if we expect people to be capable of thought, or to have anything worthwhile to contribute to the governing of the nation. We don’t expect them to have thoughtful and nuanced views on public policy. If polling amplifies the thoughtless and drowns out anything complex or substantive in noise that’s okay, we know it’s no big loss because we know most people aren’t capable of more. Maybe things would be different if we had a less consumerist and mass media driven society, but we have to work with the society we live in. In the end people are just beads on a giant abacus, and their opinions are how we keep score. It’s us, the few who actually think and who have a vision for the future, that play the game. We don’t expect to see our views reflected in opinion polls, we just rage at how stupid and easily led everyone else is when we feed them on a steady diet of their own regurgitated opinions.

All quite true. But that doesn’t make it right. Boycott polls.