Another forced-choice poll [Peter]

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Imagine a country, let's call it "country A", where polygamy is permitted; men may have up to four wives, but women may only have one husband. A man in A will avail himself of this privilege with gusto if he is able to do so; in A the decision of whether to marry or not is mainly the man's, and the women have little say in the matter. Let us also assume that there is substantial inequality among men in A. Finally, assume that there's no huge demographic problem in A, no war that killed a large proportion of marriageable men but has left the women untouched.

I now give you a forced-choice poll, where you have to pick which of these two descriptions is the least bad.

Poll #3351 Forced-choice poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

View Respondents

The situation above would be better described by saying:

View Answers

"A is a country where men have four wives"
13 (81.2%)

"A is a country where men have no wives"
3 (18.8%)

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There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I think the key point for me is that "four wives" describes a cause (people are allowed to do that, and do so), and "no wives" describes an effect (therefore lots of men end up without any wives). The latter is vague enough that it doesn't immediately tell you what cause goes with the effect – if somebody said it to me and I had no prior knowledge of conditions in country A, I'd have to get them to explain further – whereas the former makes it reasonably possible to predict the consequence of many unmarried men (assuming no unusual sex ratio) and is therefore more informative.

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The natural reading to me of the second statement is "in A, every man has no wives [i.e. no man has any wife]" (untrue). The equivalent reading of the first statement - "in A, every man has four wives" is so demographically improbable, that the first statement forces the interpretation "in A, there exist some men with four wives". This is true.

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I more or less concur.

BTW if you want to force us to choose one or the other wouldn't a radio-button poll have been better than ticky-boxes?

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Yes; the tickyboxes were a mistake. Still, changing them now would be too much trouble - I don't expect too many people to tick both boxes.

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I imagine actually they'll average about 1 each, but I have been reading the 1001 nights and I can't help but read those as proverbs.

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Hm. My instinctive description was (A). But I when I read (B) I was disturbed to see that I'd assumed (A) and wondered why I did so, and wasn't very certain. I worried I'd instinctive identified with the "better off" people.

I don't think I can explain why I thought that, but (assuming having four wives is more common) possible reasons for answering B would include:

1. Because having no wife is prevalent (which objectively seems better than all the other reasons below).

But possible reasons for answering (A) would include:

1. Because having four wives is in many countries unheard of, so saying anyone at all having four wives is informative.
2. It conveys the total distribution better, because, logically, if many men have four wives, there must be many men with none, whereas if many men have no wives, there could be a number of reasons.
3. Because we're used to people massively exaggerating the prevalence of multiple spouses, so we know that when someone says "men have four wives" they likely mean "ever" not "always".

Can I ask what prompted the question?

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A is a country where men have four wives and people who happen to be male but not good at getting wives are not defined to be "men" ("boys" perhaps?). Which isn't very fair, but would at least allow for one of these statements to be entirely true. Of course v.v. works fine also (A is a country where marrying means you are no longer "a man" but rather "a husband" or something).

Apparently in practice the very rich keep four wives in style, the very poor have four wives all with nothing and the middle classes have only one so as to better keep up with the Joneses (or local equivalent).

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Peter

Another forced-choice poll

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