Acquiescence Bias

Acquiescence bias, also called agreement bias or yea-saying, is a response bias in survey research in which people tend to select a positive or agreeing response option, such as agree over disagree on a statement like gardening makes me feel happy, without carefully weighing the statement's content against their actual views. Research estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of survey respondents show this pattern, which introduces a systematic error that can be mistaken for a genuine attitude and distort a survey's conclusions. Several explanations have been proposed for why it happens: a social norm favoring agreeableness, a sociological account in which respondents defer to what they perceive as the interviewer's authority, and satisficing, the tendency to give a good enough answer rather than the most accurate one in order to conserve mental effort.