A Taste for Consistency and Survey Response Behavior

This article studies how a taste for consistency affects decision making. Our application is response behavior in surveys. In particular, we show that the inclusion of questions can affect answers to subsequent related questions. The reason is that participants want to respond in a consistent way. Studying three different surveys, we find a systematic effect of the inclusion of additional questions. The effects are large and reveal how easy survey responses can be manipulated. For example, we find that a subtle manipulation reduced the number of people who agreed that a murderer should be imprisoned for the rest of his life by more than 20 percentage points. (JEL codes: C83, C91, D03) Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.