“What do other people think?” is also a well known trick for getting people to be honest about opinions over which they expect to receive censure.
I’m somewhat newly against this way of asking questions because I answered questions framed this way directly by supplying responses based on my model of my others rather than supplying answers based on my own preferences (not revealing anything about opinion I was trying to hide). To be specific, in this case the City of Berkeley had a survey asking people questions about housing policy, and they framed many of the questions like “How likely would your neighbors be comfortable with X in your neighborhood?”, and I answered based on how I think most of my neighbors would respond, not based on what I would prefer, and in fact I believe those two things are in opposition. When I realized they were using this technique it felt like getting duped into betraying myself.
I view this technique as relying on reversed stupidity: people may not vote their preferences because it may be psychically painful to admit their own preferences to themselves (noticing their preferences would cause cognitive dissonance) but they do project those preferences onto others and so you can find them out by surreptitiously asking them about their projections, but like all reversed stupidity it turns into just plain stupidity if the original stupidity is not there for it to act against.
This is not to say these kind of approaches can’t work if you honestly care about the question they are asking. If you want to know what people think about what other people think, this is the right kind of question to ask (I sometimes intentionally ask questions like these to find out about people’s models rather than what the models say about reality). But using them to try to “trick” people into telling you their honest opinions seems like a dishonest strategy that will not even always work.
I’m somewhat newly against this way of asking questions because I answered questions framed this way directly by supplying responses based on my model of my others rather than supplying answers based on my own preferences (not revealing anything about opinion I was trying to hide). To be specific, in this case the City of Berkeley had a survey asking people questions about housing policy, and they framed many of the questions like “How likely would your neighbors be comfortable with X in your neighborhood?”, and I answered based on how I think most of my neighbors would respond, not based on what I would prefer, and in fact I believe those two things are in opposition. When I realized they were using this technique it felt like getting duped into betraying myself.
I view this technique as relying on reversed stupidity: people may not vote their preferences because it may be psychically painful to admit their own preferences to themselves (noticing their preferences would cause cognitive dissonance) but they do project those preferences onto others and so you can find them out by surreptitiously asking them about their projections, but like all reversed stupidity it turns into just plain stupidity if the original stupidity is not there for it to act against.
This is not to say these kind of approaches can’t work if you honestly care about the question they are asking. If you want to know what people think about what other people think, this is the right kind of question to ask (I sometimes intentionally ask questions like these to find out about people’s models rather than what the models say about reality). But using them to try to “trick” people into telling you their honest opinions seems like a dishonest strategy that will not even always work.