Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 23 May 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or are lots of Malaysians being barred from travelling overseas?
Highway to Heck

Maria Chin Abdullah was recently barred from leaving the country at KLIA, where she was to catch a flight to South Korea to receive a prize. She happens to be the Bersih spokesperson and was told that the order had come from Putrajaya. The Immigration Department has since confirmed that anybody who “ridicules” the government can be barred from travelling overseas for three years. I don’t know if this is an actual law but it does mean that a lot of people will be doing Cuti Cuti Malaysia for the next few years. It could be just the excuse needed to finally make that trip to Mulu Caves or Bario and the Kelabit Highlands, but unfortunately, Sarawak might be out of bounds as well.

Barring people from travelling overseas has recently become an increasingly popular form of punishment. This is very unfortunate but it strikes me as also being a very Malaysian form of punishment. Most countries would want to stop any undesirables from contaminating the minds of their easily-confused citizens with crazy radical ideas and would therefore stop them from re-entering. You would have thought that the sensible course of action would be to keep undesirables outside the country and not to force them to stay inside. But that wouldn’t be an effective punishment for Malaysians because Malaysians love to travel and live overseas. If you don’t allow a Malaysian to re-enter the country, then it would be an inconvenience at first but before you know it, they have opened up a new Malaysian restaurant of questionable quality serving Malaysian noodle soup (laksa), Malaysian pancakes (roti canai, which can now be bought frozen at Waitrose supermarkets) and Chicken Malaya (chicken curry with pineapple chunks). Just remember that an Ipoh-born ex-Malaysian won MasterChef UK by serving up nasi lemak. I’ve seen photos of Catherine Chin Wang Ping Coombes’ winning effort. Congratulations to her but it doesn’t look like any nasi lemak I’ve ever eaten.

I used to go to a pub in London back in the 1980s and always in the corner was a group of frozen Africans. They were the Angolan opposition movement and they would silently nurse a single beer between them for several hours. They weren’t allowed to go back to Angola and if they had, they would have been killed. They’re probably now all cabinet ministers. You wouldn’t be able to find an equivalent table of Malaysian exiles because Malaysians overseas are happily winning various MasterChef competitions. The only place you will find Malaysian exiles is inside Malaysia.

Dear Kam
My wife took me to have Vietnamese food. I hated it but I told her I loved it because I did not want her to think I am boring. Why do I try so hard to be seen as interesting?
Mr Safe

It’s called “social desirability”. Before the 2015 UK general election, all the opinion polls were showing that the race would be very, very close. So close that the elections would lead to a hung Parliament without any party having a clear majority and, therefore, to another coalition government. But the election results gave the Conservatives a solid majority. Their previous Liberal Democrat coalition partners were completely trounced and Labour was hurt badly. How come the opinion polls were so wrong?

Part of the reason was that polling respondents wish to project social desirability, which a polling analyst describes as the desire to “avoid embarrassment and project a favourable image to others”. Many of the respondents were “Shy Tories” and “Lying Tories” who didn’t want to admit publicly, even to an unknown pollster, that they were actually willing to vote for the quite frankly dreadful Eton-educated David Cameron. Also, younger respondents have a tendency to lie outright about their voting intention and then not actually bother to vote at all.

Social desirability and other factors played a part in making the UK election polls completely wrong but so too did the effect of opinion polls themselves. The opinion polls were showing that there would be a hung Parliament and on election day, voters decided that they did not want that to happen above all other considerations. It’s not that British voters thought that a hung Parliament would lead to the end of civilisation and the zombie apocalypse, but they had just lived through a coalition government and they had not enjoyed it. So, they wanted a clear winner and the Tories looked better than lacklustre Labour. A similar thing happened during the Singapore elections recently when huge crowds at opposition rallies gave the impression to those attending that PAP could actually lose. On election day, voters succumbed to a fear of the unknown and the assumption that the other guy was going to vote for the opposition and PAP won by a landslide. There was also the SG50 (jubilee) and Lee Kuan Yew factor.

In the US, it has been noticed that Donald Trump fares much better in anonymous online polls than in those conducted over the telephone by a real person. I know we are not supposed to believe anything in The New York Times but a recent article says that 10 polls conducted by telephone give Hillary Clinton a nine-point lead over Trump but online surveys give her only a four-point lead.

And we can find social desirability nearer to home. The editor of a local website did an analysis of the site’s traffic and found that stories about sex were the most read but the least shared, whereas humanitarian stories were the most shared but the least read.

There appears to be a difference between our private and public opinions. Perhaps we suppress or do not admit to our darkest thoughts. When Trump called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, a telephone poll had nearly 60% opposing the proposal. But after the Brussels attack, an anonymously conducted internet poll had 51% in favour. Dark politics and fear-mongering appears to work, even when it flies in the face of all that is rational and sane. Or does it? We will have to wait and see.

Reprinted with the kind permission of