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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6353014" data-attributes="member: 4937">Please believe that that has occurred to me long before now.  I've mentioned that I thought my poll design was flawed about 5 times.That's no doubt one of several sorts of problems here.  Also problematic was that EnWorld kept rejecting my poll answers as too long and I had to rewrite them several times before I got a list that was fully acceptable.  I'm not at all happy with the wording I ended up with.  However, much as there is a certain amount of truth to your theory, it's very far from an adequate answer because even if we throw out all the 'No really I do both' as bad data, we are still left with people claiming that the always first think about personalities, conflicts and beliefs before they think about powers and abilities leading the reverse by a 2:1 ratio.   Based on prior experience, I'd in fact guess that the ratio goes the other way by about 4:1.  I don't think it at all likely that my personal experience is that radically out of touch with how people normally go about creating a character.  Just a perusal of how books normally teach you to design a character would suggest the poll results are unexpected even if you hadn't been watching the process and engaging in the process for 30 years.  Equally it's worth noting that if in fact the 'WYA first' people greatly outnumber the 'WYCD first' people in this sample then there is a real paucity of explanations that suggest real WYA first approaches.  We've got a couple of 'I voted WYA', who launched in to 100% WYCD explanations.I don't imagine there are any experienced pollsters in the world that don't know that results can be skewed by bias, or conversely that you can induce bias by carefully selecting your wording.   Two ostensibly identical questions of belief can produce radically different answers depending on how you frame them.   Again, I have no suspicions at all of deliberately attempting to deceive the pollster here.   But as an extreme example, if you ask people to assess whether they are: "Much smarter than average.  Smarter than average.   About average in intelligence.  Less intelligent than average.  Or much less intelligent than average.", you'll get absolutely truthful answers 99% of the time but they won't much reflect reality.</blockquote>

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