alt Hacker NewsWhenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
Replies
I love mental rule of thumbs / heuristics that we can install into our brain to avoid getting caught up in cognitive biases or other mistakes.
An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head.
> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes
Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.
> (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?
Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population.
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true.
> "conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews"
How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.