This paper addresses how people respond to sensitive survey questions.
➡️ New Theory
The authors introduce a social reference theory that explains why respondents might hide their true views on topics they fear others will judge, calling this bias sensitivity bias.
➡️ Practical Challenge
Researchers face trade-offs between asking direct versus indirect ("list experiment") questions—a key consideration for designing political surveys.
➡️ Meta-Analysis Findings
Analyzing all available list experiments over three decades reveals that the impact of social desirability bias is often small—less than 10 percentage points—and sometimes negligible.
| When to Worry About Sensitivity Bias: A Social Reference Theory and Evidence from 30 Years of List Experiments was authored by Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock and Margaret Moor. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2020. |
