andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1633 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Reacting to my recent post on Steven Pinker’s too-broad (in my opinion) speculations on red and blue states, Dan “cultural cognition” Kahan writes : Pinker is clearly right to note that mass political opinions on seemingly diverse issues cohere, and Andrew, I think, is way too quick to challenge this I [Kahan] could cite to billions of interesting papers, but I’ll just show you what I mean instead. A recent CCP data collection involving a nationally representative on-line sample of 1750 subjects included a module that asked the subjects to indicate on a six-point scale “how strongly . . . you support or oppose” a collection of policies: policy_gun Stricter gun control laws in the United States. policy_healthcare Universal health care. policy_taxcut Raising income taxes for persons in the highest-income tax bracket. policy_affirmative action Affirmative action for minorities. policy_warming Stricter carbon emission standards to reduce global warming. Positions c
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1 A recent CCP data collection involving a nationally representative on-line sample of 1750 subjects included a module that asked the subjects to indicate on a six-point scale “how strongly . [sent-2, score-0.294]
2 Positions clustered on these “diverse” items big time. [sent-10, score-0.144]
3 Being able to form a scale like this with a general population sample is pretty good evidence in itself (and better than just picking two items out of GSS and seeing if they correlate) that people’s opinions on such matters cohere. [sent-16, score-0.401]
4 [Kahan's graph was pretty good, but I cropped it here to make it even better, by dumping an uninformative title, an uninformative y-axis, and a pointless footnote. [sent-21, score-0.37]
5 He notes that political philosophers identify ideologies with different conceptions of “human nature,” a “conflict of visions so fundamental as to align opinions on dozens of issues. [sent-24, score-0.962]
6 But the idea that “different conceptions of ‘human nature’ ” explains coherence and variance in mass political opinion is an empirical claim, and as far as I know there’s not any support for it. [sent-26, score-0.689]
7 as a general law that explains this particular instance, etc. [sent-36, score-0.288]
8 I think that many individual people feel there is a logic connecting all their political beliefs, but different people have different logics. [sent-39, score-0.371]
9 There is a wide range of views on these two topics and the correlation is low, because these two issues can be placed in many different conceptual frameworks. [sent-41, score-0.243]
10 I think it would be fair to say that some aspects of political attitudes can be predicted from other attitudes. [sent-44, score-0.346]
11 In general, attitudes on different issues are more highly correlated with partisanship than with each other. [sent-45, score-0.34]
12 I perhaps was overreacting to Pinker’s statement because I’m sensitive to this issue, of people not realizing the diversity of opinions among Americans, especially among those Americans who are not highly politically involved. [sent-47, score-0.363]
13 Regarding Kahan’s last point, where do I say anything about “a general law”? [sent-48, score-0.11]
14 Here’s what I wrote: Psychology is a universal science of human nature, whereas political science is centered on the study of particular historical events and trends. [sent-49, score-0.475]
15 Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that when a psychologist looks at politics, he presents ideas that are thought-provoking but are too general to quite work. [sent-50, score-0.11]
16 I really do think psychology is more universal than political science. [sent-52, score-0.443]
17 Sure, there are some aspects of political science that are universal, but my own work, for example, on Democrats and Republicans is unapologetically both time- and space-bound in a way that psychology certainly tries not to be. [sent-53, score-0.326]
18 My second sentence above is phased very carefully. [sent-54, score-0.147]
19 I don’t think that “perhaps it is unsurprising” is anything like claiming “a general law”! [sent-55, score-0.11]
20 But Kahan has a good point that I was oversimplifying a bit by downplaying the predictability of attitudes across issue domains. [sent-56, score-0.23]
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