How we created a Tolerometer for 16500 Indians
The second half of 2015 saw many prominent celebrities and political leaders (barring the ruling party BJP) in India expressing their concern over the growing intolerance in the country. The entire issue caught fire and it became a huge national debate. A political one. The saga hit it’s peak when Aamir Khan, one of the biggest stars from the Tinsel Kingdom, made a comment on the growing intolerance in India.
“As an individual, as part of this country as a citizen, we read in the papers what is happening, we see it on the news and certainly, I have been alarmed. I can’t deny. I have been alarmed by a number of incidents,” he said while speaking at the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards. This incident literally divided India into 2 factions: one that believes India’s tolerant enough and the other who feels that India’s becoming intolerant to different sect of people.
As you can see on Google Trends, the words ‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance’ started trending during this time.
It’s in this context that I, along with my friends Jatin and Srijith, thought of doing a small data experiment to find out if people in India are tolerant enough or if there was indeed a growing sense of intolerance. We decided to build a quick survey experience for Facebook users from India and learn what they wanted to say about tolerance. We built a simple flow that takes users to a page with the survey. Let me explain how we went about this.
Take a 20 secs survey to know your Tolerance score!
We wanted at least 10000 online users to take the survey to have a significant sample set. That put us against the obvious challenge of attracting a lot of users to fill the survey. I have to admit that an element of clickbait-like behavior helped here. We called it the ‘Tolerometer’ (catchy name) and said we will give your tolerance score if you can take a 20 second survey for us! So we bought the domain tolerometer.com, created a quick landing page on Tumblr and hosted the survey there (since the domain is now expired, you can access the survey here — tolerometer.tumblr.com.)
This really worked, we accumulated more than 10000 survey responses in the next 30 days growing to 16500 users till date. We also employed Facebook Ad credits worth $250 for this exercise which we had with us to promote the page among Indians of 25–40 years of age, who’ll mostly care more about the issue than the other age groups.
Your Tolerance score is… Wait, why don’t you watch this video instead?
While tolerance score was something that we devised to attract users to participate in the survey, we personally were not in favour of giving a tolerance score to the users.
What would be the validity of such a score?
How do we calculate the score?
Does it even mean anything?
We decided to go semi-retard by calling it Tolerometer, but didn’t want to go full-retard by giving them a tolerance score! Scoop Whoop, an online media magazine did a baseless Tolerance quiz. After seeing that we decided we didn’t want to do that!
If not tolerance score, what can we do? After a bit of brainstorming, we decided that we’ll show our survey users a video that explains why we should just forget this (in)tolerance debate and celebrate the diverse country that India is. So the users who took the survey were redirected to this video that we created with the help of Kiran, Shivani and Typito team:
While some people appreciated that we directed them to this video, others felt cheated. The backlash was evident on the comments on Facebook post and the YouTube video :).
We learnt a lesson here — Don’t try to cocky, give users what they came for. Deflecting them to something else seldom works.
What did 16500 Indians say about Tolerance?
Here’s a summary of how people responded to the 4 questions we asked them:
As you can see the responses to the questions on Food and Religious Tolerance swayed the most towards a dominating answer. Most users (91% and 76% respectively) felt that they are happy to accommodate others food and religious habits. When it came to expression of thought via art, the majority (49%) felt that artists should be able to express their opinion while also trying their best to be socially responsible. Next to that, 31% users felt art should have complete freedom, even if it hurts someone. On very similar lines, 51% of the users felt that the ruling party (BJP at that time and now as well) should focus on overall economic development while 35% of the them felt their priority should be strengthen the weaker sections of the society.
The results clearly indicate that Indians are accommodative and tolerant under normal circumstances. When people are not provoked, India can thrive to be a nation that’s nice to a diverse set of cultures.
Hofstede Insights on India’s tolerance
Our learnings were also consistent with the report by Hofstede Insights, a company that tried to solve intercultural and organisational culture challenges by utilising their data frameworks. Their report suggests that India has a low ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’ compared to it’s neighbouring nation Pakistan.
Here’s what they comment on ‘Low Uncertainly’ score of the two nations:
“India scores 40 on this dimension and thus has a medium low preference for avoiding uncertainty. In India, there is acceptance of imperfection; nothing has to be perfect nor has to go exactly as planned. India is traditionally a patient country where tolerance for the unexpected is high ; even welcomed as a break from monotony.”
“Pakistan scores 70 on this dimension and thus has a high preference for avoiding uncertainty. Countries exhibiting high Uncertainty Avoidance maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas.”
Learnings from the Experiment
It was definitely fun to see your survey floating around in the internet with the help of some word of mouth publicity as well. However, it’s to be noted that this small study can’t be indicative of the general sentiment of most Indians since the instrument we used was an online survey that was restricted to small set of online users. Here’s the survey we used. This study can’t be used for professional settings since the questions we used were totally based out of intuition and not validated. We also learned that it’s important to be really empathetic with participants in an experiment like this — if you promise something, it’s important to keep it up :).
But nonetheless, it was a nice little experiment and we loved doing it. Hope to share details of other noob data experiments I’ve got my hand on!
This was originally written here.
