Why surveys quietly lie to you
Your engagement score is not exactly a lie. It is a performance, and the form is what asks for it.
Every year the engagement survey goes out, the score ticks up a point or two, and leadership exhales. And almost everyone who filled it in knows they rounded up. That gap, between what people feel and what they tick, is not a flaw in your particular survey. It is a property of surveys, and it has been measured for decades. Start with the best-known culprit, social desirability bias, the pull to give the answer that makes you look good rather than the one that is true. The psychologist Delroy Paulhus showed it is really two separate things. One is impression management, the deliberate cleaning-up of an answer for an audience: the person knows the truth and chooses to present a tidier version. The other is self-deceptive enhancement, a genuinely held but rose-tinted view of oneself. The first eases when responses are anonymous. The second does not, because the respondent is not aware they are doing it. Neither is lying in any ordinary sense. Both bend the data the same way. Sitting alongside it is acquiescence, or yea-saying, the quiet drift to agree. Faced with a statement like “I feel valued at work,” a meaningful share of people will lean towards agreement regardless of how they actually feel, because agreeing is easier than dissenting and because the statement itself hints at the expected answer. Close behind is satisficing, where a tired respondent stops weighing each question and simply straight-lines down the column, choosing the same box all the way to the bottom to be done. Then there is the thing that makes all of it worse. Survey fatigue is a bias amplifier: the longer and more obviously self-serving a survey, the more people rush, agree, default to the middle, or abandon it entirely. A good rule of thumb is that if you could not complete your own survey in under ten minutes while reading carefully, it is too long, and every question past that point is collecting noise. Here is the part that catches people out. Anonymity helps, but it does not cure the problem. It reduces impression management, the deliberate version, but it does nothing for the honest self-flattery, and it cannot change the basic fact that a form is a form. A flat list of someone else’s questions, with no one on the other end, signals a box-ticking exercise, and people answer in the spirit they are asked. They give the shape of an opinion without the substance of one. So your score is not wrong, exactly. It is shaped by the medium that collected it. Which means that tuning the wording will only take you so far. Past a certain point, if you want a truer answer, you have to change the medium, not just the question. References
- Paulhus, D. L. (1984). Two-component models of socially desirable responding. Overview at Lensym, Social desirability bias: examples and how to reduce it.
- Shingo Institute, Employee survey pitfalls (acquiescence, satisficing, social desirability under anonymity).
- Typeform, Survey response bias: what it is and how to avoid it (survey fatigue as a bias amplifier).
