‘A terrible night for us pollsters’ according to YouGov’s CEO Stephan Shakespeare. With the General Election exit polls, and eventual outcome, taking many by surprise, the focus today has turned to the polling.

Source: www.research-live.com

The political pollsters get it wrong again is the cry. The final polls detected an incorrect swing. There are many questions to be answered on how this type of polling is done as this article suggests. Many others appear to have misread this general election too though. Are there some fundamental, basic principles at work here in terms of human behaviour though? However hard we may try to decipher likely behaviour – and remove bias through sampling techniques and methodologies – we still often find a great difference between what people say and what they do. 

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