A little over a year ago, a pollster came to my front door. No Internet point-and-click survey, no telemarketer dialing my number during the dinner hour. Just a tired but eager kid, tromping through the streets.

“Which Presidential candidate do you support?” he asked. I didn’t want to answer, preferring to keep my voting record to myself. He tried again: “Well, then, what’s the single most important issue for you in the upcoming election?”

I was silent. Not, this time, because I was mildly offended, but because I was overwhelmed. Where to begin? How to choose? And what difference, in the end, would my answer make?

The poll-taker, watching his open-ended question pull me underwater, tossed out a few ropes: The war in Iraq? Health care? Reproductive rights? I shook my head. All of them. None of them. Why was he asking me? I thanked him and wished him good luck – with other people, not with me.

I may not have made a good poll subject, but there are plenty of other Oregonians who do. In 1992, a bevy of pollsters fanned out across the state and got more than one thousand people to respond to a survey about life in Oregon. In each county, randomly selected Oregonians went to central polling stations and filled out written questionnaires. They were asked such questions as, “What do you like or value most about living in your community?” and “What do you personally value about living in Oregon?” Later, two hundred gathered for group discussions to give pollsters a sense of the thinking behind some of the responses.

The massive poll, called the Oregon Values and Beliefs Survey (OVBS), was the collective brainchild of several Oregon business and civic organizations. Frustrated by a series of failed public initiatives, these groups (one of which included former governor Neil Goldschmidt) decided they needed to figure out what Oregonians really cared about before they could go about suggesting statewide reform. A follow-up survey was conducted in 2002, with a telephone poll of 2,400 people and another set of group discussions.

In both surveys, “participation in family” ranked first on the list of core Oregonian values, and career, independence, charitability, spirituality, and the environment rounded out the top six. However, that’s where the similarities ended. In community values, neighborhood safety was tops in 1992, but accessible health care triumphed in 2002, and though two-thirds of the respondents believed that the state tax system needed to be changed, they were divided as to how. And education remained a leading priority, with Oregonians preferring curriculum reform in 1992 and funding reform in 2002.

But what does any of it mean? Do the response discrepancies mean that while Oregonians’ core values and beliefs remained relatively unchanged over ten years, their sense of how to implement policy changes has shifted? Or is it a waste of time to read much of anything into the survey’s results? “There’s no kind of purely scientific way of measuring public opinion the way we measure blood type,” says Regina Lawrence, an associate professor of political science at Portland State University. “The Oregon Values and Belief Survey is two brief snapshots, taken ten years apart. Are we attaching a trend line here? All you can say is, here’s how people were thinking in 1992, and again in 2002. What that really means is hard to say.”

But the attitude shifts documented in the survey may show where Oregonians think they’re going. According to the survey, Oregonians are afraid that the gap between rich and poor will grow and that government services will recede along with the middle class. They love Oregon, but 49 percent of the respondents also thought Oregon was “on the wrong track.”

Perhaps just the act of trying to understand what people believe is laudable, whether door-to-door like the eager kid who caught me on a bad day or with questionnaires and phone interviews like the OVBS. Bob Doppelt, director of Resource Innovations at the University of Oregon’s Institute for a Sustainable Environment, says you can’t just look at an event – say, a failed initiative – and scratch your head. If you want to understand it, you need to figure out the chain of causes that led up to it. This is essentially what the framers of the OVBS tried to do. As Doppelt puts it, “Is the world really a scary place? Everybody’s out to screw us? Is that our vision of the world? If so, that will lead us to create structures to protect ourselves at all costs.” Doppelt, who specializes in systems thinking as applied to organizational and social change, says it’s important to ask, “What vision of the world did we or do we hold that led us to these kinds of structures that produce these patterns that led to these events?”

Trying to understand Oregonians’ vision of the world was certainly one of the goals of the survey, but the sponsors of the OVBS have different takes on what that vision was and where to go from there. Adam Davis, a Portland-based opinion researcher hired to help design and implement the survey, feels that the respondents were quite clear on certain issues. “This study really suggested that it would be very difficult to expect Oregonians to pay any more in taxes for government services,” he says. “It showed also that you can’t just talk about education funding without talking about education quality.”

For Rich Peppers, the assistant executive director of SEIU Local 503, a labor union that helped sponsor the 2002 version of the survey, the results were more frustrating than illuminating. “One of the findings was a sense of losing the middle, of having a greater polarization in the state on a whole range of issues, such as taxes and the environment,” he says. “If you come from a perspective of wanting to move the state forward and reaching out to the broadest number of people, that’s frustrating.”

Regina Lawrence points out that the results of surveys like the OVBS depend entirely on how the questions are presented. “If you just call people up and ask them their preferences about things, you’ll get one set of responses,” she says. “But if you physically bring them together and arm them with information, you get different preferences. Answers on the phone are really off-the-top-of-the-head answers; no one really ponders them. But if people have the opportunity to think about things, their answers change. Deliberation matters. And the dynamics are really different face to face than when you’re acting in isolation.”

Davis agrees, saying that the written questionnaires were packaged to control the order in which respondents filled them out and the phone surveys were designed to prevent respondent burnout. “Sequence is very important,” he says. “As you go on in a survey, your respondent becomes sensitized to it. And you can’t keep people on the phone for more than twenty minutes, which is one reason why we had two different versions of the questionnaire.”

Still, the vagueness of such terms as “education” and “charitability” meant that individual respondents almost certainly had differing notions of what those words meant. Davis says that a quantitative number doesn’t necessarily mean that all respondents agree why an issue is important. The survey’s two-tiered structure was designed to address this problem. The idea was that the private initial poll would provide quantity, while the public group discussions would provide quality. “For example, perhaps highly educated or high-income people are telling you that quality education is important because it should provide a solid preparation for college so that my child can compete out there in the global economy,” Davis says. “But then you’ve got a blue-collar family saying, that’s fine, but I really just want my child to be able to do basic math and be able to read and spell and get along with other people and value certain things so that they can get a job and get on with life. And there’s a difference there that’s motivating people.”

The power of this group-discussion model is that it may actually give the most complete picture of what a particular group of people believes and, more importantly, show how these belief systems are complex and fluid. Some Oregonians have taken this model and turned it into a way of life. Since the late 1980s, several dozen intentional communities called cohousing have been founded around the country. Purposely built by their owner-inhabitants as dense neighborhoods, cohousing communities are designed to foster social interaction. Nearly all of them make decisions by consensus: every member must agree to a proposed action, purchase, theme song, what have you. Each community may take several years from conception to completion, but each member has to approve each step. Majority, in cohousing, does not rule.

In Oregon, there are four completed cohousings and six in various stages of formation. The Corvallis cohousing, called CoHo, has been in development since 1999; its thirty-plus members hope to break ground in 2006 and move in a year later. Through their business meetings, committee sessions and potluck dinners, they’ve had to learn not just how to function as a group but as a community. They’re polite, but they’re not quiet; they’ve realized that if they leave an issue on the back burner, it eventually starts to smolder. Their private beliefs must frequently become public declarations. As a result, they’ve learned how to turn compromise into consensus.

As the influential social psychologists Serge Moscovici and Willem Doise point out in their book Conflict and Consensus: A General Theory of Collective Decisions, compromise and consensus are not one and the same. In Moscovici and Doise’s unconventional theoretical outlook, a group compromise is an average, a tarnished mean reached by each member of the group giving up something so that the end result is neither beloved nor hated. Compromise, they write, “smooths over differences, suppresses excesses in interests and ideas, discourages eccentric behavior, and in brief ensures that social life is lived without clashes.” Consensus, on the other hand, is a form of group agreement in which groups settle on any position but the mean, and often somewhere extreme. “Its function is not to eliminate tensions or preserve an equilibrium between opposing propositions, but, on the contrary, to let them modify one another with the least amount of virulence, until a common element arises among them. Discord, far from representing failure or resistance … is the most valuable lever of change.” Consensus, in this view, is not a concession but a new belief; once a group has reached consensus, its members will believe in the decision even alone in their own homes. “How can one explain the fact that … these same individuals … continue to recommend risky choices, faithful to the position of the group of which for a while they formed part?” ask Moscovici and Doise. “They have manifestly changed and have adopted a different perspective, like those persons who opted for new types of food or made up their minds to economize on energy.”

Of course, reaching consensus is easier said than done, because systems aren’t naturally flexible. As Bob Doppelt notes, “If a social system wasn’t structured to resist change, every time someone came in with a new idea, the system would just be chaos.” As a consultant, Doppelt relies on empirical data to persuade clients to reassess their belief systems. “Most of the time, beliefs are formed through experiential events, through dealing with the world,” he says. “You have to allow (people) time to deal with the world in a different way.”

Moscovici and Doise believe that refusing the average and heading for someplace new show the enormous potential of consensus for fostering social change. “The role of consensus in modern societies is less to dispel uncertainty and tensions than to allow mind sets to evolve and transform norms and social bonds without destroying them,” they write. “Far from stagnating, or falling into an insipid conformity, societies are permanently reinvigorated.”

In the first half of 2005, for example, CoHo spent months hammering out a pet policy. Dog lovers, cat lovers, pet abstainers – everybody had to figure out a set of rules they could all live with. Should cats be allowed outside? If so, only during the day? Can you spritz a neighbor’s annoying cat with water? By August the group had agreed to a policy that restrained cats and dogs to enclosed yards and leashes. But as member Valerie Hervey points out, this was a sea change from the group’s initial outlook. “The mood is towards more pet control, not less,” she says. Casual permission had evolved into careful restriction.

CoHo begins with a willingness to compromise and ends up with an attitude shift – and a new belief. “We’re not all going to get our ideal house,” says another member, Juva DuBoise. “Not all our needs are going to be met. We have to think about what we can live with.” What they can live with is not necessarily what they originally thought they wanted or even needed. Fireplaces? Cozy, but too drafty and expensive. Garages for every car? Not enough room, and besides, in cohousing you can usually borrow a neighbor’s car. A chicken in every pot? Well, maybe, but not for the vegetarians.

Because the OVBS was a poll, it had careful controls for diversity (categories including race, age, gender, income, marital status, education, employment, and region), independence (participants did not know each other), and decentralization (the survey was conducted throughout the state). Cohousing groups possess none of these controls. They are not particularly diverse, since they form through friendships and word of mouth. They are not independent because members are not always total strangers. And they are certainly not decentralized; they would not exist if they could not form locally. But their goal is not some sort of secret wisdom culled from private surveys and public discussions; it’s to find out what works best for the group by turning private preferences into public beliefs.

Many people struggle to stay with a cohousing community throughout its years of development; job changes, growing kids, and evolving priorities all take their toll. But one joins a cohousing community voluntarily, and one can leave it voluntarily. One couple dropped out of CoHo because they felt the group’s environmental efforts were never going to become stringent enough. In many ways, the path to consensus for a cohousing community is smoothed by its voluntary nature. It is a self-selecting group and must reach consensus by choice or not at all.

Although the OVBS, in the end, isn’t about finding some sort of Oregonian consensus, it’s good to know that it’s possible to move beyond our myriad and often conflicting beliefs toward a place of progress and change. But getting there can be tricky because it requires discussion and reflection. And it’s very hard to look below the surface, says Bob Doppelt. “Often people don’t really understand what their culture is, because it’s so deeply embedded,” he says. “Nobody talks about what you have to care about if you’re going to be part of this group and the behaviors you have to show if you’re going to be part of this group.”

Undoubtedly, some Oregonians are concerned only about getting by, unwilling to question or voice their views of the wider world. Maybe that’s how I felt that day when confronted by the pollster, hesitant to say anything. Would I have been more candid during a phone interview or while filling out a questionnaire in the privacy of my own home? Would I have been motivated to hash out my beliefs face-to-face, surrounded by others who disagreed with me? Would I have found my way to a new belief? It’s hard to know, but it’s clear that some Oregonians pay more than just lip service to the notions of community and progress. The Corvallis cohousing community, for example, wants to be more than just a close-knit neighborhood; it wants to be a model for social change. And while the sponsors disagree about the usefulness of the OVBS, they agreed that it was important to try to get a handle on what Oregonians believed. Even though Peppers was disappointed with the survey, he says, “I think it shows there’s an underlying core value of Oregonians: that you don’t desert people in need, and you help them out.” If that’s indeed the case, then perhaps Oregon isn’t on the wrong track after all.