PR comes in for its fair share of criticism for creating surveys to prove a point for a client. Sometimes PR-led surveys are revealing and insightful, other times less-so.

Leaving your doubts about the significance of some ‘according to a survey’ statistics to one side for a moment, there is something very intriguing about the perennial our-survey-says story and that’s why it continues to be an important part of our toolkit for clients.

Taking quirky surveys to the next level is www.correlated.org a website that helps discover surprising correlations between unrelated topics by asking a question each day and looking for the biggest discrepancy from people in general. So for example:

• 48 percent of people can burp at will. But of those who don’t enjoy camping, only 33 percent can burp at will.
• In general, 29 percent of people describe themselves as good dancers. But among people who have never dyed their hair, only 16 percent say they’re good dancers.

What does this tell us? People who dye their hair have better self-confidence and a campsite is not a good place to run a burp the alphabet competition.

At the moment the website has a database of just under 400 people – but if you need to know whether piano players are likely to faint in public, I’ve found the site for you.