A few weeks ago, I asked my audience some odd questions,
and more than 13,000 people answered.
Some folks tried to work out what the video was going to be about,
but very few guessed correctly,
and that's because they didn't have the other piece of the puzzle:
I also paid a professional polling service to ask the same questions to the public.
What I was actually trying to answer is: How Weird Is My Audience?
There’s a deliberate double-meaning to "weird" there.
If I poll people watching this channel,
the results will have the same bias that plagues psychology experiments: you're WEIRD.
Western, Educated, and from Industrialised, Rich and Democratic countries.
Not all of you, not as individuals, but overall, that's what viewers here tend to be.
That WEIRD bias is why many psychology experiments that talk about “humans”
are actually just talking about college students from America. But because of that,
I didn’t compare this audience to the entire world.
That would have been very expensive,
involve translating questions into many languages,
and it wouldn’t actually have been that meaningful to most people watching.
Instead, the polling service asked that I pick one English-speaking country to compare against.
Most of my viewers are American,
and the US was also the cheapest to poll, so,
we are comparing my audience to a representative sample of just over 1500 adults from the US.
For some questions, I expected to find a big difference.
For some, I expected no difference at all. And for some questions… well,
I just found them funny.
Question one!
When I put a call out for questions to ask,
dozens of people suggested this.
So first, let’s see how the general public responded.
There wasn’t a significant difference between any of the demographics there,
“dog person” is safely in the lead.
As for my audience…
And I can’t explain that. I don’t think I’ve ever made a video about cats or dogs or animals at all.
Maybe if “infrastructure person” was an option that would have won by a landslide.
But something about this audience makes you more likely to be a “cat person”.
The internet likes cats, I guess.
Next question. I put a call out for academics who were looking for a large audience to poll,
and while only one of those questions actually made it into the survey, I really do find it fascinating.
This came from researchers at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London,
who are investigating Olfactory Mental Imagery:
the ability to imagine scents.
I got a load of suggested questions from people who were interested in aphantasia,
aphantasiacs are people who don’t have a mind’s eye,
but that’s already been polled a lot:
this is asking whether you have a mind’s nose.
It took a while to hammer out the question into a form that’d
work for the polling company. So it’s not perfect --
it does exclude folks who can imagine smells but can’t imagine pictures or sounds,
but that should just be a very small number of people.
Here are the results from the public. And they’re puzzling,
because they do not match what the researchers expected at all.
About a quarter of folks said that they can’t imagine
a loved one’s face or play back a familiar song in their head.
Now, aphantasia like that is a thing, absolutely,
but it’s meant to affect only a small percentage of people, probably less than 5%,
so that indicates the question might have gone wrong somewhere.
The results from my audience, meanwhile...
they're more or less what the researchers expected. That makes a lot more sense.
The most likely explanation, I think,
is that it’s a complicated question. It requires thought,
and the public who were being asked, well, they're being paid to answer.
A significant number of people won’t think about the question,
and will pick whichever answer will get them
through the survey as fast as possible. So in this case,
I’d trust my audience to be more representative of the world at large,
just because there’s no profit motive there.
So in this case: my guess is that you’re normal.
Now, when I put the call out for questions,
there were a lot of divisive but meaningless ones suggested.
Whether the toilet paper should go over or under.
Whether the centre or the edge of the brownie is better. But no-one suggested:
should you put one or two spaces after a period, or a full stop if you’re British.
And that’s the reason I went for the question.
Because it is divisive out there in the world,
but no-one in my audience thought to ask about it.
HTML, the language that the web is built on, collapses whitespace.
In the code that makes up web sites,
it doesn’t matter if you use one, or two, or fifty spaces,
they all get crushed down to one unless you specifically tell it not to.
And a lot of sites don’t bother doing that.
So often, even if you do type two spaces after a period,
it’ll appear as one to whoever’s reading it.
I’m not going to weigh in on the argument myself,
because it could be a whole video on its own, but I will say this: wow,
does my audience disagree with the world here.
The public are almost split down the middle. 55% say “one space”,
45% say two. If you break it down by age,
there is a trend towards one space,
but even among 18-24 year olds, it’s still only about 70-30.
My audience? 95% one-spacers. Even for people over 65,
more than three-quarters just use one space.
And my theory on this is simple:
most of the audience for this poll came from Twitter.
I did try to post it on my YouTube community tab as well,
and y’all crashed Google Forms by rushing to it.
So that’s a new responsibility I have to worry about. But even allowing for that,
one space is the standard on basically every social media site.
If you do post with two spaces after a period,
it’s now a pretty big sign that you’re not used to the internet.
And my audience tend to be used to the internet.
So congratulations to the one-spacers.
It’s pretty clear that you have won.
You just need to convince the folks who still hit the spacebar twice.
I’ll be honest, this isn’t an academic question.
No-one suggested it. But as I wrote the questions,
and realised that a genuine polling company would send this out to people,
I just could not stop giggling at the idea of something this ridiculous.
This is a scruffy owl. It doesn’t look wise.
It doesn’t look like the owl out of Harry Potter.
It looks kinda like it’s annoyed at being woken up.
I did not expect there to be any difference between the public and the audience,
I just wanted to see some funny owl names.
But there was a difference. Ignoring the people who just typed “OWL”,
the most popular names from the public were some variation on “Hoot”, like “Hooter” or “Hootie”.
Second place, “Olly” or “Oliver”.
Which makes sense, “Olly the Owl” scans nicely.
But from the people who watch my videos: the top answer is “Henry”.
Hootie is the eighth most popular. Oliver is 15th.
There is a difference, for whatever reason, in the names that this audience chose.
And: almost everyone read the owl as male.
There’s only one definitely feminine name in the Top 100, and that’s Athena,
because the Greek goddess Athena is often depicted with an owl.
Even if you filter to just women replying,
the top answers are Henry, Harold, and Gerald,
and there are only four definitely feminine names in their top 100.
But yes, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a few of the individual outliers:
Clovenhorn, Destroyer of Mars; Baron von Murderpillow,
Flappy Ben Soulgazer; Jimmy Tallon; James Van Der Beak;
Miss Scarlet Blumberton of East London; Persephone the Uncanny;
XxX_The_Mouse_Killer_69_XxX, and Former UN Secretar--
-- and Former UN Secretary Gen... I can't say it!
And Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.
That'll have to do, I got through it.
This question turned out to be kinda dull,
because it’s exactly the answer you’d expect.
This audience is more familiar with internet phenomena than the general public,
even for references that go back more than twenty years, even for Chuck Testa,
an obscure Rhett and Link gag from a decade ago. Of course we’re in a bubble.
It’s often difficult to remember quite how much we’re in a bubble,
but… yeah, turns out getting the result you expect is a little bit boring.
The younger you are, the more likely you are to recognise any of these.
And men are more likely to recognise them --
but that makes sense since I set the questions,
there will be other references that I don’t know that would cause the opposite result.
However, that wasn’t the main point of the question.
The real reason was to see how many people claimed to know
what the Mist Challenge was. There is no such thing.
There’s never been an internet craze called that.
But just under 4% of the public and 2.5% of this audience
ticked the box anyway. Were they misremembering?
Were they trying to appear more in-touch than they actually were? I wouldn’t like to guess.
But I’m going to claim that my audience is more honest and trustworthy than the public.
Which brings us to the final question.
How weird do you think you are?
No guidance. No examples. Just a scale to pick from:
“very normal” to “very weird”.
And this… I think this was the most revealing difference of all.
Because for the general public,
there’s quite a spread of opinion.
7% are happy thinking of themselves as “very normal”.
14% think of themselves as “very weird”.
Around half sit in the middle.
Women tend to rate themselves slightly more weird;
older folks tend to rate themselves slightly less weird. That’s the public.
But for this audience…
Almost no-one wants to think of themselves as being “very normal”. Less than half a percent.
And under 5% think of themselves as “very weird”.
More than 40% described themselves as slightly more weird than average. Don’t get me wrong,
that’s still the majority opinion of the public as well,
it turns out most people like to think they’re just a little bit out there compared to the world,
but the people in this audience are much, much less likely to think of themselves as being
on the extreme ends of the scale, in either direction.
Is that because you’re more likely to be spending lots of time on the internet,
to have been exposed to more people and opinions,
and therefore have a different boundary for what “normal” and “weird” mean?
Is it because, ironically, you are more likely to conform,
and to want to sit in the middle of the chart and not draw attention to yourself?
Or is it just that the public, when paid to answer a survey,
don’t think it through?
I don’t know the reason why. But big picture:
the answer to “how weird is my audience”?
Probably, more weird than you think you are.
This year's been really difficult for production, for obvious reasons,
there's been a lot more filming against a green screen in a tiny flat than I thought there would be,
so I do want to say thank you to William Marler, who's been my animator through this year,
and who has put together these incredible graphics,
there is a link to him and his podcast in the description.