Adam Kucharski

I think at the moment it's somewhere in the middle, a balance.

The Korean War stands out, for example.

Some British soldiers reported things getting a bit sticky.

Americans interpreted that as they were digging in and everything was OK.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

I mean, this is a problem that goes back decades where, you know, originally the CIA realised that amongst themselves, even writing reports, they meant very different things.

Of course, if you put a phrase like realistic possibility or one of the ones that struck them was a serious possibility of an invasion.

And the person that goes to has a very different mental idea of actually what that means.

You can get into trouble.

So there's been attempts, you know, for example, in UK guidance, realistic possibility issues.

for it to mean 40% to 50%.

But of course, as that gets communicated, that meaning can very quickly drift.

UK intelligence and within government.

So, for example, a lot of the COVID reports, if you saw those when they went to the public domain, you had this little what's called a yardstick at the bottom.

And NATO has a similar one.

IPCC for climate has another where it says, if you use this phrase in this report, this is the range that you mean.

So it's very helpful for people who are actually kind of working on those things.

But actually, some of these phrases that although there's a kind of hard number on it in a report, actually, when it gets out to the wider domain can really mean a lot of different things.

So what's kind of interesting is institutionally, there's quite a difference, actually, in terms of how different organisations define these.

But in the data, you know, across this few thousand people, we did see a little bit more optimism with Americans, about kind of about 3% overall in terms of if you ask a phrase, what that means.