Altered tradeoffs between uncertainty and feeling in inherent indecisions: Uniform-binomial mixture densities to gauge the impact of shifts in work operations on employees

Abstract

Responses from large sample surveys are routinely analyzed and often ingeniously recycled to sense people’s latent tendencies, to erect policies, trigger changes. The way these responses originate, whether they are exact revelations, often, at best, get glossed over; at worst, ignored, leading to unexpected impacts when fresh policies get deployed. Here, we analyze Likert scale answers we collected in collaboration with Gallup, surveying 5835 US residents on how they sense guidelines on remote work or a four-day work week or spending time on work outside of scheduled hours could impact their lives. Through binomial-uniform mixture densities, we make provisions for answers to be generated as a result of an inherent uncertainty and feeling towards a topic. We test whether the basis of responses - positive or negative - is imprecision, an unsureness towards an issue, whether sureness gives way to a certain kind of feeling. We find the tradeoff between uncertainty and feeling switches across topics. For some, such as a four-day week or returning to in-person work, uncertainty and feeling covary, while for others, such as spending time outside of work, they anti-vary. Often, separation of demographic-political profiles pairs up with separation of uncertainty-feeling profiles making guessing the impact of new policies predictable.