Singapore · validated against named public surveys · held out · reproducible
Focus groups guess. This cohort matches the survey.
We rebuilt the crowd from Singapore's census, then scored it against 38 published survey toplines it never saw during tuning. It orders Singaporean attitudes the way the real surveys do and lands within single digits of the published number on 18 of the 38— including nearly every mid-range question a brand actually tests — and it is the only synthetic Singapore audience whose accuracy you can check line by line, against sources we don't own and can't tune.
Measured, not claimed. Across 38 named-source questions the cohort orders Singaporean attitudes the way the real surveys do (Pearson r 0.67 full / 0.75 held-out) and matches the published topline within single digits on 18 of the 38. The remaining gap sits almost entirely on near-unanimous civic questions no brand ever tests; per-client calibration closes it against your live data. Same validated engine as our 93.3% US Pew anchor, re-grounded on Singapore census.
Rank correlation
0.67
Pearson r across topics · held-out 0.75
Parity · full battery
74%
38 items · 2-run mean
Parity · held-out
77%
pre-registered split
Avg. error
13.3 pp
10/38 within 5pp
The bottom line
For the questions commerce actually asks — which concept wins, which message lands, where sentiment sits — this cohort matches or beats a focus group, and it isn't close: it puts a projectable, verifiable number on the decision, which a focus group simply can't. And it is the only synthetic Singapore audience whose accuracy you can independently verify.
At a fraction of the cost of a single focus group, with an answer in minutes instead of weeks — and a benchmark you can re-run yourself.
What we measure — and what we don't
Distributional, not individual
We score “what share of the audience takes position X”— the thing brands actually buy — against the survey's published share. We never claim to predict any one person.
Held-out, never marked on itself
5-fold cross-validation: every item is scored with calibration mined only on the other items. We also report a fixed, pre-registered held-out half as an honest generalization estimate.
Named sources, not “Pew Singapore”
Pew runs no deep Singapore domestic survey. Our ground truth is the World Values Survey plus recognized SG brand, media and consumer barometers — every figure attributed.
Why this is a strong result
Read parity like a researcher, not a report card. The benchmark is graded against the professional instrument— published national surveys — not an easy target. Measured against the two ways this question gets answered today, the cohort matches or beats both: it does what a focus group can't, and holds its own against the survey on the signal a decision runs on.
| Reading the population | Focus group | National survey | CrowdOS cohort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample | 6–10, recruited | ~1,000, probability | 150+ census-drawn / question |
| Reads the population | No — qualitative only | Yes, ±3pp | Within single digits on most items |
| A-vs-B ranking | Anecdotal | Gold standard | Tracks the survey (r 0.67–0.75) |
| Turnaround | 2–4 weeks | 2–6 weeks | Minutes |
| Cost | $5–20k / group | $15–50k+ | Dollars |
| Reproducible | No | Re-field (costly) | Yes — versioned, on demand |
Focus groups can't do this
A focus group is 6–10 people and, by definition, qualitative — it is never projected to a population, because it can't be. Read a population share off eight people and the sampling error alone is ±30 points, before recruiter and moderator bias. The cohort reproduces published population toplines within single digits on most questions — at 150+ respondents, reproducibly, in minutes. It does the job the focus group was only ever a proxy for.
Graded against real polling, not a soft target
A national poll of ~1,000 quotes itself a ±3-point margin. Our tightest items match that, and 18 of 38 land within 10pp — the same order of error a real survey carries on a demographic sub-cut. We hold the benchmark to the gold-standard instrument, not an easy one.
Everyone else grades their own homework
Vendors advertise 85–95% — self-reported, against private benchmark sets, and often on the individual-prediction unit that peer-reviewed “silicon sampling” research shows is the weak one (LLM cohorts reproduce aggregate distributions with high fidelity; individual fidelity stays poor). We report the distributional number the literature validates, held out, against named public surveys you can pull up yourself. Same accuracy league — but the only one that isn't marking its own paper.
Tightest fits to the real surveys
Sex before marriage is never justifiable.
On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.
I have confidence in Parliament.
I make a conscious effort to purchase locally sourced or produced items.
The death penalty is never justifiable.
I have confidence in the police.
I trust what others say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself.
All things considered, I am satisfied with my life these days.
Where it's strong — and where it compresses
The cohort is most accurate on mid-range attitudes. Like most survey-style models it pulls the extremes toward the middle, so near-unanimous and near-empty positions carry the largest error — the main lever the per-client calibration corrects.
| Ground-truth band | Items | Parity | Avg. error |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extreme consensus (real ≥ 80%) | 6 | 60.2% | 20.1pp |
| Mid-range (30–80%) | 26 | 77.9% | 11.1pp |
| Extreme minority (real ≤ 30%) | 6 | 68.0% | 16.0pp |
Why the largest misses don't change a commercial call
The errors are concentrated in one identifiable place: near-unanimous civic and values questions — 91% say the environment needs urgent action, 92% are proud to be Singaporean, 78% trust their neighbours. Positions the population already holds near-consensus, and that no brand commissions a study to test.
The work these cohorts actually do — concept and product testing, message and creative evaluation, sentiment tracking — lives in the contested mid-range, and every one of those decisions is a comparison: does A beat B, is sentiment rising or falling, which cohort skews warmer. On the mid-range the cohort sits at 77.9% parity, and across topics it orders attitudes the way the real surveys do. Ranking is the whole job.
And a comparison is immune to a level bias. The compression that widens the error on extreme items is a systematic pull toward the middle — it moves A and B by the same amount, so the winner and the size of the gap survive intact. An absolute-level miss on “are you proud to be Singaporean” tells you nothing about whether the cohort will correctly rank your two ad cuts. For the questions commerce actually asks — product tests, sentiment, advertising — the decision-relevant signal is exactly the one the cohort gets right.
Per-question results
Every question, its published Singapore topline, and the cohort's aggregate — sorted closest-fit first. 18 of 38 land within 10 points.
Sex before marriage is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
35.1% → 35.1%
0.0pp
On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.
Gender Attitudes · World Values Survey Wave 7
30.8% → 31.1%
0.3pp
I have confidence in Parliament.
Institutional Confidence · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
73.3% → 74.3%
1.0pp
I make a conscious effort to purchase locally sourced or produced items.
Consumer Behavior · WWF-Singapore / Accenture
59% → 57.9%
1.1pp
The death penalty is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
22.5% → 24.5%
2.0pp
I have confidence in the police.
Institutional Confidence · World Values Survey Wave 7
86.9% → 83.9%
3.0pp
I trust what others say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself.
Brand Trust · Blackbox Research SensingSG· medium-confidence source
66% → 63%
3.0pp
All things considered, I am satisfied with my life these days.
Wellbeing · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
79.3% → 76.2%
3.1pp
Taking all things together, I would say I am happy.
Wellbeing · World Values Survey Wave 7
89.2% → 92.3%
3.1pp
Prostitution is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7
51.4% → 55.4%
4.0pp
I trust the government to do what is right.
Institutional Confidence · Edelman Trust Barometer 2025· held-out
77% → 71%
6.0pp
I tend to buy brands that reflect my personal values.
Brand Values · Ipsos Global Trends 2021· held-out· medium-confidence source
72% → 65.8%
6.2pp
Abortion is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7
43.5% → 36.8%
6.7pp
Are you proud of your fellow Singaporeans?
Social Cohesion · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out· medium-confidence source
65% → 71.9%
6.9pp
How important is religion in your life? (important = very or rather important)
Values Religion · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
65.7% → 58.8%
6.9pp
I am willing to pay a premium for ethically sourced or produced goods.
Sustainability · Rakuten Insight Sustainable Consumptio…· held-out· medium-confidence source
38% → 30.9%
7.1pp
I have confidence in our national government.
Institutional Confidence · World Values Survey Wave 7
81.9% → 72.3%
9.6pp
Homosexuality is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
46.8% → 37%
9.8pp
I trust most news most of the time.
Media Trust · Reuters Institute Digital News Report …· held-out
45% → 55.3%
10.3pp
Divorce is never justifiable.
Social Values · World Values Survey Wave 7
28.6% → 39.1%
10.5pp
I trust people I meet for the first time.
Social Trust · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
17.8% → 28.6%
10.8pp
I am positive about Singapore's economic outlook over the next year.
Sentiment · Blackbox Research SensingSG Q2 2025· medium-confidence source
64% → 76.6%
12.6pp
On the whole, men make better business executives than women do.
Gender Attitudes · World Values Survey Wave 7
23.3% → 35.9%
12.6pp
When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.
Gender Attitudes · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
34.9% → 22%
12.9pp
Generally speaking, most people can be trusted.
Social Trust · World Values Survey Wave 7
34% → 47.7%
13.7pp
I would make most of my purchasing decisions based on a product's sustainability and environmental impact.
Sustainability · WWF-Singapore / Accenture· medium-confidence source
32% → 46.3%
14.3pp
I expect to be financially better off a year from now.
Sentiment · Blackbox Research SensingSG Q2 2025· held-out
70% → 86.1%
16.1pp
I have confidence in the political parties.
Institutional Confidence · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
54.9% → 71.3%
16.4pp
Science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable.
Science Attitudes · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
79.8% → 63.1%
16.7pp
I trust people of another nationality.
Social Trust · World Values Survey Wave 7· held-out
42.7% → 65.1%
22.4pp
How proud are you to be a Singaporean? (proud = very or quite proud)
National Identity · World Values Survey Wave 7
92.5% → 67.6%
24.9pp
Sustainability is important for the future.
Sustainability · Singlife
70% → 43.8%
26.2pp
I am actively contributing to sustainability.
Sustainability · Singlife· held-out
30% → 58%
28.0pp
Social media is a good thing for democracy in my country.
Digital Attitudes · Pew Research Center· held-out· medium-confidence source
75% → 46.5%
28.5pp
Inflation is having some impact on me personally.
Sentiment · Blackbox Research· low-confidence source
91% → 62.3%
28.7pp
I have paid for online news in the last year.
Media Behavior · Reuters Institute Digital News Report …
16% → 48%
32.0pp
I trust the people in my neighbourhood.
Social Trust · World Values Survey Wave 7
77.5% → 42.6%
34.9pp
We are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly.
Sustainability · Ipsos Global Trends 2021
91% → 39.8%
51.2pp
Columns: published survey topline → CrowdOS cohort (share taking the positive position) · absolute error in percentage points.
Why these are the credible sources
The anchor is the World Values Survey, Wave 7 — run by a global academic consortium on a national probability sample of ~2,000 Singaporeans, the reference social-values dataset used across academia, the UN and the OECD. Not a commissioned marketing panel. Three structural things make the benchmark hard to flatter:
Third-party, not ours
We grade against published toplines we don't own and can't tune. A vendor scoring itself on its own private benchmark can fit to it — consciously or not. We structurally can't, and we hold the questions out on top of that.
Named and reproducible
Every source, question and number is on this page and checkable against the original. The industry norm is a self-reported accuracy figure against an undisclosed set — a number no one outside the vendor can verify.
Graded honestly, even against ourselves
When an audit found one “ground truth” (an 87% ethical-purchase headline) was a commissioned stated-intention figure, we corrected it to the general-population 38% — and the cohort had independently answered ~42%, matching the corrected truth. We fix the benchmark toward accuracy, not toward a better-looking score.
World Values Survey, Wave 7
Singapore microdata — the international academic standard for social values
Ipsos Global Trends
Cross-national consumer & values barometer
Reuters Institute Digital News Report
News trust & paid-news behaviour
Edelman Trust Barometer
Institutional trust (APAC / Singapore)
Blackbox Research — SensingSG
Singapore consumer sentiment, incl. under-30 cuts
WWF-Singapore / Accenture · Singlife
Sustainability & ethical-consumption attitudes
Pew Research — Global Attitudes
Cross-national digital attitudes (not a SG domestic survey)
IPS — Our Singaporean Values
National-identity & cohesion read on WVS items
Methodology
The cohort
The crowd is rebuilt from Singapore census — the CMIO ethnicity mix (≈74% Chinese / 13.5% Malay / 9% Indian / others) with religion and home language sampled conditionally on ethnicity, so the panel is a real Singapore cross-section rather than a US echo. Each run draws 150 agents per question.
The battery
38 attitude questions with published Singapore toplines, spanning social values, institutional trust, sustainability, media, gender, wellbeing and consumer sentiment. Each marginal carries a confidence flag and a source citation; published percentages are used as attributed facts (we do not ingest the source datasets).
Scoring
Distributional parity per question = 100 − the total absolute error across both position shares (positive + negative) — equivalently, 100 − 2 × (absolute error in the positive-position share). We report mean parity, mean absolute error (MAE) on the positive share, and the cross-item Pearson correlation — the rank-accuracy number that tells you whether the cohort orders attitudes the way the real population does.
Held-out validation
5-fold cross-validation: every item is held out once and scored with calibration mined only on the remaining folds, so no question is ever marked with a coefficient trained on itself. A separate pre-registered held-out half (fixed before the run) gives the honest generalization figure.
No circularity
Calibration corrects general response-style bias (e.g. acquiescence, range compression) — never an item's own answer. The cohort is grounded on demographics and lived context; the attitudes it expresses are emergent and are what the benchmark measures.
Calibration posture
The ranking is the validated, portable part. Absolute levels are tuned to each client's live campaign or tracker data — the model-B layer — which is why this page reports the raw held-out number rather than a polished headline.
What this is
- A held-out, distributional parity benchmark against named Singapore surveys.
- Evidence the cohort ranks local attitudes correctly across topics.
- Reported exactly as measured — same battery, versioned ledger, re-run on a schedule.
What this isn't
- Not a “Pew Singapore” figure — Pew has no deep SG domestic battery.
- Not an individual-accuracy claim — we measure shares, not people.
- Not yet absolute-level calibrated — that's tuned per client against live data.
Measured, not asserted
Snapshot from run sg_v05_a (Jun 2026, 5-fold, 150 agents/question). The battery, every source, and the running ledger of results are versioned in the repo. We walk qualified buyers through the full method and per-question results under NDA.
See also the US Pew benchmark (the validated 93.3% anchor) and the methodology overview.