3 Ways to Avoid Acquiescence Bias

When novelist Ursula K. Le Guin received a survey from her alma mater as part of the hubbub around her class’ 60th reunion, she dubbed it “interesting” and proceeded to approach the questions with a critical eye and a sardonic wit.1

When asked if she was living her “secret desires,” she wrote:

Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.”

Our tendency to accept statements or questions on their face is called acquiescence bias. When we acquiesce to how a question is framed or a statement is asserted, we accept its basis as a kind of truth. What Le Guin did when she challenged the premise of the survey question was to avoid acquiescing to how it was framed.

For a moment, let’s set aside that “Are you living your secret desires?” is a nonsensical thing to ask (if you’re living them, your desires are, by definition, not secret). Many people would accept the question’s premise and subconsciously substitute words like “deepest” or “strongest” for “secret.” In doing so, there’s a subtle reinforcement that strong or deep desire ought to be something we keep to ourselves.

In addition to being an exquisite sentence, “My desires are flagrant” confronts that assumption. It resists the implication that desire is something to hide or temper.

Le Guin continues her appraisal of the survey by addressing Question 18, which she admits “really got [her] down.” This question asks what she does in her spare time and helpfully supplies 27 ways she might do so. On the list are many activities one would expect a graduate of an elite institution to do in their eighties: golf, bridge, and racquet sports, for instance. One of the options listed is “creative activities.”

This gives Le Guin pause. Her work has been a “creative activity.” She was one of the most prolific, respected, and decorated science fiction and fantasy writers of the 20th century and beyond. How do you measure “spare time” and determine how you spend it when your paid work is other people’s hobby?

Yes, that certainly puts a wrinkle in this seemingly simple question. But Le Guin goes further. What do we mean by “spare” in the first place? Spared from what? Spared for what? She writes:

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

I like where Le Guin lands with this question. All of my time is occupied by living, as well. Or at least, that’s my intention. Acquiescing to the framing of productive versus non-productive, busy versus spare, or necessary versus disposable isn’t a useful way for me to conceive of my daily 24 hours.

These seemingly inconsequential acquiescences are everywhere, though.

They shape our reality and influence what we perceive as problems and how we decide to “solve” them.

Social scientists, marketers, data scientists, and others who rely on well-crafted research surveys to do their jobs well are trained to avoid acquiescence bias. They learn how to spot the language that creates a leading question and the question formats that trigger agreement rather than a thoughtful response.

Of course, acquiescence bias can be leveraged for commercial or even nefarious purposes.2 Most ads do exactly that. I remember one YouTube commercial that Sean and I used to see regularly that began with a dude (technical term) demanding to know: Do you still wear layers to go outside? The implication is that wearing layers was ineffective (and possibly unmanly) and that viewers should buy this all-in-one jacket-hoodie-thing instead.

But, counterpoint: layers are great?

Acquiescence bias also affects problem-solving, planning, and goal-setting.

We accept our initial appraisal of an issue for the sake of cognitive efficiency and then try to address it within those bounds. We might even skip our initial appraisal and accept an expert’s framing without further reflection. What we decide to do next might be a great way to address the issue as initially framed, but an ineffective or harmful action plan if we were to reframe the issue. We acquiesce to a preexisting idea of success, or growth, or self-discipline rather than consciously framing what we want. That is, making our desires flagrant.

For example, over the last couple of years, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about starting a Substack. Fair enough. But asking whether you should start a Substack acquiesces to Substack’s framing of the issue. A better question is: Would writing an email newsletter serve me (and presumably my readers) well? If the answer to that question is yes, then you can ask whether Substack is the right service for you—or if one of the other newsletter services would be better.

Not only is that a question that doesn’t acquiesce to Substack’s framing, but it’s also a question that gives us more information to consider. Do I want to write an email newsletter? What does serving me mean? What would serving my readers look like? And how could I measure whether or not I’m doing it well?

In a recent post, Anil Dash argued against calling your newsletter a Substack:

Email’s been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.

When you call your newsletter a Substack, you acquiesce to Substack’s terms of engagement, which might very well be unaligned with or even antithetical to your own purposes.

Avoiding acquiescence bias requires curiosity—and an almost pedantic attention to how we use language to describe problems or needs. It will slow you down and more than occasionally frustrate others. It will often mean swimming against the current and putting in more work than seems necessary. But it’s essential to coming up with long-term solutions and workable plans.

So how do you do it? How do you spot your tendency to acquiesce so you can better frame an issue?

But why?

My first stop is always two little words: But why?

• But why do you want to start a Substack?

• But why do you want to build an audience?

• But why do you want to delegate more?

• But why do you want to automate these tasks?

“But why?” is especially helpful when what we’re acquiescing to feels like conventional wisdom or a strategic truism. Underneath those simple phrases, we’ve already jumped to a number of conclusions. For instance,

• If I start a Substack, I can make money from work I’m already doing.

• If I build my audience, I can sell to more people.

• If I delegate more, I’ll be able to focus on more valuable work.

• If I automate these tasks, I’ll free up my time so I can work less.

Those statements may or may not be true. At the least, they presuppose that the solution you’re considering is the best way to reach your actual goal or fill your true need. Beyond that, though, they reveal something truer than the initial premise. They offer a different way to frame the issue.

For example, let’s examine the issue of delegation. Delegating can be great, but it’s not nearly as straightforward as people often make it out to be. Typically, the more you delegate, the more you have to manage—either the tasks themselves or the people doing them. We tend to assume that delegating a task means it’s out of our hands; we get all that time back. But delegating, even to the most independent and competent person, leaves some residue on your workday: questions, quality checks, project management, etc.

That residue isn’t a reason not to delegate, but it is a reason to ask more questions. Is the task you want to delegate necessary? Is there a substitution for that task that alleviates the same issue? Could you find a more efficient way to include the task in your workflow?

When we ask, “But why?” in response to our original framing, we get critical information for rethinking the issue from the ground up.

Who benefits?

Another way to get at critical information is by considering who benefits from framing an issue in a particular way.

As Dash pointed out earlier, “Should I start a Substack?” becomes a pretty different question when we consider that Substack benefits from framing the decision that way.

Again, that doesn’t mean that using Substack is a bad choice. By examining who benefits from framing an issue in a particular way, we can reframe it to better balance those benefits. “Should I start an email newsletter?” removes the unintentional bias in favor of Substack and offers a frame for us to consider how we (and our readers) would benefit from an email newsletter.

It’s entirely possible to acquiesce to a framing that benefits us unfairly, too. I’ve seen this for years all over the online business space.

Coaches and influencers frame their followers—small business owners and aspiring influencers—as the heroes of the story. And so whatever framing they’re offering for a particular question, problem, or challenge ends up framing the small business owner as the person who needs to benefit most. In the process, there is little, if any, consideration of how proposed solutions impact other stakeholders, such as customers or team members. The solution on offer is that much more compelling for its moral simplicity.

But let’s look at a far more egregious case of framing a problem out of self-interest: artificial intelligence companies. The companies building large language models claim they can’t pay for the intellectual property they use to train those models, or they’d go bankrupt. A cynic might (and I will) state this claim: If we don’t break the law, we can’t make gobs of money.

By framing the issue as one with corporate life or death stakes, AI companies blur the lines about who benefits (and, ultimately, who gets taken advantage of). But businesses aren’t entitled to profit. They’re not entitled to success. They want us to acquiesce to their terms because it benefits them. They demand we acquiesce to their terms so that they can exist and be wildly profitable. The absurdity of their demands is laid bare when you reframe the issue.

When we ask who benefits from the way an issue is framed, we can tease out the various stakeholders and reframe the problem based on what we learn.

Remove the Guise of Objectivity

The guise of objectivity is often what triggers our acquiescence. ‘That’s what the numbers say’ or ‘That’s what the research says’ often hides a framing that can and should be questioned. Even fairly straightforward data is constructed with an assortment of biases, desired results, and worldviews.

The other day, when I was checking in on a client’s content on Instagram, I noticed a post by old acquaintance of mine. Years ago, she had been one of many online business influencers who seemed on a supersonic flight from reasonably credible to pastel QAnon adjacent. I clicked to her profile to see where she’d ended up, which didn’t really get a good read on, because I saw a pinned post about creating a chatbot to figure out who to vote for.

I clicked to watch the video. Yes, she’d created a chatbot that prompted you to explore the issues in “conversation” with ChatGPT. Based on your responses, the chatbot would tell you how your preferences aligned with the candidates or proposals and provide additional context. She claimed that, amidst the miasma of deeply biased media, this chatbot would provide objective, unbiased responses.

Of course, there’s nothing objective or unbiased about chatbots. They are trained on media that isn’t fact-checked, conceived by people with agendas, and used by people who are predisposed to believe what they read on their computer screen (we all are). Worse, a chatbot doesn’t come with the context that getting news from Fox, MSNBC, The New Republic, or Breitbart does. We know more about how a news brand is biased because bias is part of the brand (even when denied).

This example is particularly appalling. But implied objectivity is everywhere. For instance, podcasters have been freaking out about the audiences disappearing for the last year. But it was just a change to when Apple Podcasts accessed files—not an industry-wide revolt against podcasts. A drop from 40k downloads per month to 20k downloads per month seems like an objectively bad situation. But the “download” has always been a constructed metric that seems to say one thing (someone listened) while actually meaning something else (an app accessed a file). This change only revealed something that more closely resembles objective reality—but still misses the mark.

OG Twitter users feared leaving X because they didn’t want to leave their massive audiences behind to start over. After all, having 40k followers is objectively better than 3k followers, right? Wrong. Turns out that users are receiving far more traffic and engagement from BlueSky than Twitter, even when their audiences are exponentially smaller on the newer platform. The follower metric is a construction that only hints at influence. On X, influence is determined through algorithmic distribution, which has been hostile to most users long before Elon Musk took the reins. Objectively, it doesn’t matter if you have 40k followers when none of them see your content.

Any problem or question framed as obvious, objective, or self-evident should be interrogated. Any framing that relies on data or how data is interpreted should be investigated further. Even when objectivity isn’t used to make us acquiesce to a bad framing purposefully, it can still cause us to miss alternatives from which we’d benefit.

Go Forth & Reframe

It’s always a good time to be aware of and resist our tendency to acquiesce to problems or questions as they’re presented. But it’s especially critical when making big decisions, as we often do at the end and beginning of each year.

Before you set your plans in motion, consider how platforms, marketers, politicians, or media may have framed the challenges you’re trying to overcome or the goals you’ve set. If reframing the issue brings you to the same conclusion, have at it! You’ll be that much more confident for having taken a beat to reconsider.

But if reframing gives you a different perspective and leads you to a different plan or goal, you’ll have made your desires flagrant and get to occupy your time with what matters.

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