In STAT 200 (my favorite class…not), we discussed the issue of using an “anchor” in a research question. An anchor is a fact that is used in a question to allow people to base their answers off of. It is used like a normal anchor is used, to set a guideline in order to prevent the ship from swaying too far away. The example they used in class was wording the questions in different ways to see if the students knew Canada’s population. When my professor worded the question like this:
What is Canada’s population knowing that the U.S. population is 309 million?
The average population size that students guessed was around 142 million.
But when the question was worded like this:
What is Canada’s population knowing that Australia’s population is 22 million?
The average population guessed was around 28 million.
As boring as this actually sounds, I thought it was really interesting, how different the answers my professor got by using a different country as a reference point. It goes to show that not only do people not know what the population of Canada is but also it shows how tricky statistics actually are. A statistician is trained to come up with the best question in order to get the best results. The change of one word or a phrase can really make a drastic change on the results the statisticians gets. Its important to be aware of this trick to make sure we don’t get “sucked” in to the complex word of statistics and to make sure we take them with a grain a salt. Because do numbers really never lie?
