How Now Brown Cow, Do You Get That Chocolate Milk?
Or At Least How Do You Make Sense of Truly Senseless Survey Questions?
“Americans are not very bright,” many people may attest. “Just look at those survey results that showed 7% of them believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.”
Wow, this news story has been circulating for several years now. It first broke in 2017, long before the days of Covid when Queen Elizabeth II still reigned and Betty White was still giving her comedy acts. It was reassuring in a world already going haywire in many respects to prescribe that humans were still pretty clueless. With survey results like that, it was easy to explain why so many Americans voted the way they did or failed to understand complicated issues like climate change.
But the thing about that survey, conducted by the Innovation Center for Dairy, is that it was in so many ways a senseless survey. In fact, the minds behind the survey even admitted as much in correspondence to NPR:
It turns out the masterminds behind the survey were never even that serious about the whole thing:
The intent of the survey was to be lighthearted and fun. We know people are confused about where their food comes from. Our ultimate goal is to find compelling ways to spark conversation about food and agriculture as the majority of us are generations removed from the farm. This was not a scientific or official market research piece and never was intended to be. This same lighthearted survey also showed that 43 percent of those surveyed would give up their social media channels for a year’s supply of free ice cream.
Furthermore, the survey question itself was troubling(remember how many sciences tell us that survey results are profoundly impacted by the way a question is asked). Respondents were only offered three answers:
“Well, there was brown cows or black-and-white cows, or they didn’t know.”
So, if you have a survey question with three wrong answers which one do you choose?
Additionally, if one of the answers is “I don't know,” then doesn’t that bring a whole other problem as respondents do not want to give the impression they are clueless or even ignorant?
Finally, the question doesn't necessarily imply that the milk came out of the cows fully flavored with chocolate and additional sweeteners. Respondents could have been thinking that brown cows produce darker milk which is naturally easier to mix with chocolate, sugars, and the like. This would then make the answers of brown cows quite a logical conclusion (certainly this is open to interpretation).
Perhaps one of the only solid conclusions we can reach from this study(and its frequent citations) is that we should be skeptical of such matters. We should remember that nothing is ever quite as simple when it comes to any type of survey or experiment results(as any reality in the universe holds a level of unbounded complexity). And goodness, we should also remember that human beings are never as simplistic as they are sometimes made out to be. We can have a little more faith in people.
