She has recently joined the RANZ Wellington Executive Committee
As researchers, we are all very conscious of Behavioural Science, the discipline that aims to explain, predict, and influence human behaviour. Many research agencies have internal behaviour science experts, models and/or a copy or two of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge on their bookshelves. At the end of the day, research and behavioural science go hand in hand - we are all trying to help our clients influence change within their markets or among their customers (or citizens) in one way or another, whether that be changing their spend, brand preference or behaviour. Bobby Duffy, who was the Managing Director of the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute in the UK until September 2018, has a deep interest in the impact of behaviour science principles (and the media) on our perceptions and misperceptions about the world, in particular our individual, social and political realities. He founded a survey back in 2013 with the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London to investigate how wrong (or right) the British public was on topics such as the composition of the population and the 24
InterVIEW March 2019
By: Amanda Dudding, Director Public Affairs, Ipsos
Amanda Dudding is Director, Public Affairs at Ipsos and heads up their Wellington office.
scale of key social policy issues. The results were both fascinating and insightful, and so the survey was repeated across 14 countries the following year. Since then it has been held annually, covering different important topics and growing each year, with the 2018 measure including 37 countries. Ipsos NZ took part for the third time in 2018. We asked New Zealanders the same questions as were asked in 36 other countries at the same time. If I asked you what proportion of the New Zealand population are Muslim, what would you estimate? In our industry, we tend to have a firm understanding of the makeup of our population, but that’s not necessarily the case for the general population. On average, New Zealanders estimated that 11% of our population are Muslim, when in reality it’s just 1%. Compared to some other countries, we were relatively accurate, Australian respondents on the other hand were far more misaligned with reality. They had an average guess of 17%, which was 14 percentage points above the actual of just 3%. South African respondents, at the most extreme end of misperception, had an average guess of 26% when the reality is just 2%.
