  Opinion polls have now become a very important component of society because
they are now a defacto component of our daily news cycle and because their
results influence governments and business in ways which are not always obvious
to us. However, polling is not always accurate and there have been some really
inaccurate polling results which have had major influences on the world going
back to the 1930s but also as recently as just the last 3 or 4 years. In this
paper we analyse the phenomenon of socially desirable responding (shy voters)
which has emerged as one of the reasons for modern day inaccurate polling. We
describe how it can be exposed through implicit association tests (IATs) and we
demonstrate the shy voter effect in a small survey on opinions in Ireland
towards the United Kingdom. We argue for inclusion of IATs in traditional
polling and point to the fact that these can be conducted accurately online,
which also allows polling to reach a larger and more diverse sample of
respondents in the days of Covid-19 restrictions which restricts the
opportunities for poll sampling from the general public.
