> If I thought most Americans were unhappy these days, my reaction to seeing this poll would be to question how my intuition went so wrong, not to look for ways

> If I thought most Americans were unhappy these days, my reaction to seeing this poll would be to question how my intuition went so wrong, not to look for ways the might be biased. That's putting undue weight on quantified data, and letting it shut down attempts to actually find the truth. Polls can be biased or badly designed, metrics can be gamed or not actually measure what they claim to, or the poll could be founded some flawed assumptions. If you assume your intuition is wrong when you see a "strong" poll result, you'll never discover errors of the kind I just enumerated.