Human Truths Beneath the Numbers

Today, at the European Parliament, I gave a talk called Human Truths Beneath the Numbers at the ESOMAR Citizen Insights Summit.

The case I used was the Hungarian election. Three weeks before the vote, we published a qualitative read of 10,000 conversations and called a two-thirds supermajority while polls were spread across a 14-point range.

But the election was the proof, not the point.

The point is the layer underneath it.

Decisions are social

People do not decide alone. They decide inside cultures, inside shared assumptions about what is normal, what is ridiculous, what goes without saying. These assumptions emerged between people, in millions of exchanges, and they govern what any product, policy, or campaign is allowed to become.

There is a name for what lives between people. We call it social truth.

It is not opinion. Opinion lives inside a person. It is not sentiment. Sentiment is a score applied after the fact. Social truth is the shared meanings, tensions, and silent agreements that hold groups together and govern how they act.

It moves first. Individuals catch up.

Precise instruments, wrong target

Surveys were built to measure individuals. They are precise instruments, perfectly calibrated for the wrong target. Numbers got called rigour. Culture got called vibes. A generation of strategists were trained to defer to one and discount the other.

At Bakamo we read the conversation before we write the questionnaire. Discovery first. Measurement second. Strategy third.

None of this is new thinking. Every qualitative researcher who pushed back against a rushed questionnaire, every anthropologist who sat in a community before writing a report, every ethnographer who believed understanding must come before measurement: they have carried these principles for decades.

Listen first. Start with culture. Understand before you count.

Build on reality.

Read the full Hungarian election briefing.