Peter Leppik posted an insightful story on the VocaLabs blog about a recent trip to his local Home Depot where an apparently store sponsored signed informed customers "9 or 10 = PASS, 1 through 8 = FAIL." The sign was apparently in reference to the register tape survey customers were being asked to take when they got home.

Peter’s point is that "any time you give someone an incentive to hit a goal, you’re also creating an incentive to manipulate the metric."

What struck me as well, though, was the that it is so easy to get respondents to change their ratings based on such simple instructions. It is a good reminder that, in the end, respondents don’t care very much about the ratings they give and are happy to manipulate their responses to meet the needs of an anonymous sign posted in a store.

Read Peter’s post at VocaLabs.