More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns.
I... I notice that I am confused. How could such a large percentage of people get these easy questions wrong? Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as an ontological statement?
(nods) I would expect so.
But also, even among people who do evaluate it, there are many who will answer strategically... that is, something like "Of course the answer is A. But I believe that if I say A, my answer will be used to defend conclusions I disapprove of, whereas if I say B, my answer will be used to defend conclusions I approve of. So I will say B."
Actually, I wonder now whether anyone has done studies of people's linguistic processing when reading sentences like this. It probably would not be too difficult to determine whether the sentence is being parsed differently in the first place or not, and if so to establish potentially interesting specifics about how the "default" parsing is being interfered with.
Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as [a propositional] statement?
That is more or less the human default. And of course you won't get them to admit it if you ask them "are you just signaling?", because that very question and its answer have signaling value themselves.
This isn't a deliberate deception; I'm convinced that most people's brains process language first and foremost as signaling-transactions and not as propositional content.
I'm confused too. Now I'm wondering if that figure seems so unrealistic because I don't expect blatantly obvious stupidity to come from libertarians.
Now I'm confused. I expect any significant political party (or similarly wide grouping of people) to produce blatantly obvious stupidity.
But you've been around here a while, you know all this stuff. So what am I missing? Why would you expect libertarianism to be an exception? (If there is a LW-appropriate answer.)
Anyone who knows enough economics to even bother identifying as a libertarian
I don't find that self identification as a libertarian demands any degree of economic fluency, any more than social conservatism demands familiarity with the contents of the Bible.
I Was Wrong, and So Are You
I think I'd feel a little more encouraged if the title was "I Am Wrong, and So Are You".
It seems to me that the main problem with that article is that the survey questions were badly designed. The writer claims that the questions “tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles” – but in fact they merely tested people’s willingness to interpret vague or misleading questions (with nothing at stake...hardly “real-world”) as the experimenter intended.
Given that ambiguity it is hardly surprising that respondents chose to interpret the questions in a way that flatters their personal ideology. This does not demonstrate that the respondents are irrational in any way; if anyone is irrational it is the person who thinks that these surveys prove such a thing.
A few of the questions are listed with the "obviously false" answer in brackets:
a dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person (disagree)
This doesn’t specify whether it is referring to an average rich/poor man, or as a general condition for all rich/poor men. If the former then it is obviously true, but if the latter then it is false. A highly motivated entrepreneur of a penny-pinching disposition might care more about a dollar than an ascetic monk, for example.
...when
I think and hope you could drastically reduce this effect by giving people an ADBOC box to check. It would promote the idea to the test-taker's attention, and it would be extra appealing since it's clearly the most sophisticated option and shows you're a nuanced thinker.
Unfortunately, real life discourse generally doesn't have a prominently displayed ADBOC checkbox. People have confidently informed me that gun control laws fail to reduce people's access to guns.
I don't remember where I saw it, but after the Gulf of Mexico spill last year there was a poll about offshore drilling asking if the spill had changed opinions on offshore drilling in general. People were asked if the incident made them less likely to support further drilling, more likely to support further drilling, or neither. A significant percentage selected the second, presumably responding as if the question asked if they favored offshore drilling in general.
It's logically possible the spill could have made someone more supportive of drilling. This w...
A article in the Atlantic, linked to by someone on the unofficial LW IRC channel caught my eye. Nothing all that new for LessWrong readers, but still it is good to see any mention of such biases in mainstream media.
I Was Wrong, and So Are You
A libertarian economist retracts a swipe at the left—after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.
...
You may have noticed that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows that people are more likely to heed information that supports their prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information. Suppose that on some public issue, Anne favors position A, and Burt favors position B. Anne is more likely than Burt to agree with statements that support A, and to disagree with statements that support B, because doing so simplifies her case for favoring A. Otherwise, she would have to make a concession to the opposing side. Psychologists would count this tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”
Buturovic and I openly acknowledged that the set of eight statements was biased. But these were the statements we had available to us. And as we explained in the paper, some of them—including those on professional licensing, standard of living, monopoly, and trade—did not appear to fit neatly into a partisan debate. Yet even on those, respondents on the left fared worst. What’s more, in separate research, Buturovic found that the respondents themselves either had difficulty classifying some of the statements on an ideological scale, or simply believed those statements were not, prima facie, ideological. So while we thought the results were probably exaggerated because of the bias in the survey, we nonetheless felt that they were telling.
Buturovic and I largely refrained from replying to the criticism (much of which focused on myside bias) that followed publication of the article. Instead, we planned a second survey that would balance the first one by including questions that would challenge conservative and/or libertarian positions.
...
Buturovic began putting all 17 questions to a new group of respondents last December. I eagerly awaited the results, hoping that the conservatives and especially the libertarians (my side!) would exhibit less myside bias. Buturovic was more detached. She e-mailed me the results, and commented that conservatives and libertarians did not do well on the new questions. After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.
Writing up these results was, for me, a gloomy task—I expected critics to gloat and point fingers. In May, we published another paper in Econ Journal Watch, saying in the title that the new results “Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse.” More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.
The reaction to the new paper was quieter than I expected. Jonathan Chait, who had knocked the first paper, wrote a forgiving notice on his New Republic blog: “Insult Retractions: A (Very) Occasional Feature.” Matthew Yglesias, writing at ThinkProgress, summed up the takeaway: “Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.” Nothing illustrates that point better than my confidence in the claims of the first paper, especially as distilled in my Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Shouldn’t a college professor have known better?
I break here to comment that I don't see why we would expect this to be so given the reality of academia.
Perhaps. But adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well.
Discourse affords some opportunity to challenge the judgments of others and to revise our own. Yet inevitably, somewhere in the process, we place what faith we have.