It is a racing certainty, if you look at the comments under this post on facebook, twitter, or other social media platforms, that you will find at least four or five people saying that the new opinion polls in yesterday’s Sunday Papers showing that the Irish public support the latest NPHET restrictions are “fake polls”.
That is a human reaction to information that does not make immediate sense to us: To try and explain it away as some anomaly, or act of malfeasance. Unfortunately, that won’t change the reality. These are reputable, scientifically conducted polls, carried out by reputable, and, in the case of Ireland Thinks, very good pollsters. There is no logical reason whatever to dispute the findings:
The government announced the following restrictions…
I agree with the new restrictions: 65%
I disagree with the new restrictions: 30%Big age-divide. More details in tomorrow's @IrishMailSunday.
Representative sample size: 1,089. pic.twitter.com/ahLPM16CLK
— Ireland Thinks (@ireland_thinks) December 4, 2021
🚨POLL🚨
Kantar / Sunday Independent
Q. "What is your view on the government and health service's response to the current increase in Covid-19?"
Too Cautious: 21%
About Right: 32%
Not Cautious Enough: 35%
Unsure: 12%29 Nov – 3 Dec (Before latest restrictions announced)
— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) December 5, 2021
What is driving these results? Here are a few factors to consider:
– The restrictions themselves were carefully poll tested
NPHET and the Government have retained, since the beginning of the pandemic, Amárach Research to poll the public. Amárach is a very good pollster, who, no doubt, provide Government and NPHET with reams of data on what the public is thinking every week. NPHET has to be conscious of public opinion when it comes to restrictions, because restrictions with no public support may not be obeyed. It is a racing certainty that most of the measures recently announced – facemasks in schools being a leading example of this – will have been opinion polled well in advance, and NPHET will have known they were popular with a broad section of the electorate before announcing them.
– Age is a huge factor
Again, this should not be surprising. Closing Nightclubs over Christmas, for example, severely impacts the social life of the young. When you are pushing forty, like me, and your Christmas plans revolve around grazing on chocolate while watching soccer in the afternoon and movies in the evening, Nightclub closures have basically no impact. It should also be considered that, in relation to children, telling parents that the risk of covid to their child is very small is not very persuasive, because parents do not like taking any risk at all with their children.
By and large, the older a person gets, the more likely they are to support more covid restrictions. This is not surprising, because the older you get, the more likely covid is to kill you. This is fact, but the problem is that studies in the United States have shown that the public still greatly over-estimate how dangerous covid is, even for the old.
Add that all together, and you get a compelling recipe for public support of restrictions: They disproportionately impact the young, and are seen as disproportionately beneficial to the old. No surprise, then, that the young oppose them, and the old support them.
– Polls do not measure intensity of feeling
This is a very important point that often gets overlooked, and might be being overlooked by NPHET here. A poll can only tell you what percentage of people answered yes or no to a particular question. It cannot tell you how motivated they are, or how strongly they feel. This is a weakness of opinion polling, if you are trying to use it to understand public opinion.
That is because, regularly (indeed, usually) 30% of the public who feel very strongly about something are more likely to prevail in the longer term than 60% of the public who hold the opposite opinion casually. Why? Because people with strong views are more likely to organise, and protest, and campaign against those in power, and make life difficult for politicians.
Does this mean that the 30% do feel more strongly than the 65%? No, it does not. It is simply a caution that we do not know and important piece of information.
– Support for restrictions is not the same as compliance with restrictions
This might be the most important point of all: It is easy to tell a pollster that you support the latest restrictions, but supporting a restriction, and actually cancelling your Christmas plans with family, are two different things. In fact, it is eminently possible that some people support these restrictions on the basis that many people have the option to ignore them entirely: The limits on family gatherings, for example, are entirely advisory. There will be some section of covid hyper-cautious people who obey them to the letter, but it is reasonable to expect that a great many people will nod their heads and say “yes, sure”, and then continue living their lives as normal anyway.
– Restrictions justify our own poor character
To be clear, the previous bullets in this piece are factual statements. This one, by contrast, is a personal opinion, which the reader can take or leave. It should be noted, though, that vaccine passports, for example, have always been very popular with voters in Ireland despite no evidence that they do anything to limit the spread of covid 19. What they do, though, is something inherently appealing to many people: They punish perceived wrongdoers. That same observation might be made about nightclub closures, which are perceived in some circles to punish young people who get drunk and behave irresponsibly. Facemasks in schools, too, appeal to the darker part of the human psyche, and the notion that children cannot be trusted to behave themselves. All these beliefs have the helpful side effect of transferring responsibility for illness onto somebody else. As such, if you get covid, you can blame the unvaccinated, or the children in schools, or the reckless young. These restrictions appeal to human resentment: If you are older and at risk and worried you might not be able to see family this Christmas, then it provides a scrooge-like crumb of comfort that everybody else is being made as miserable as you are.
It should not be a surprise that many people feel that way.
– The public have been victims of misinformation
This last bullet point is again a personal view – though in this case more of a personal hunch. One thing that an opinion poll can do is tell you what people think the answer to a question is. It would be very interesting to see an opinion poll asking people basic questions on the pandemic, like, for example:
– In the last week, has the number of covid patients in hospital risen, or fallen?
– What percentage of people who get covid end up in hospital?
– Is the Omicron variant more, or less lethal, according to early studies, than other variants?
My strong hunch is that most people would answer these questions incorrectly, and in one consistent direction. After all, most of them get their news from RTE.