Because the study in question here used a general political scale and party self-identification, many people will be identified as favoring gun control even if they did not do so. There are good reasons for this—I’d accuse the study of priming its subjects, if the authors asked about beliefs on gun control directly before asking about a hypothetical study on gun control—but it’s an important thing to note, and the study largely skims over it.
That’s most immediately important, because if you take that 30% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats, and then try to think about ways they could tilt the results of the study, you end up with the possibility that politically-motivated innumeracy might cause people to do worse at a math question than flipping a coin. At a deeper level, that sort of party identification meaning us-versus-them is kinda a big reason political discourse is so shallow these days.
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About 30% of self-identified Republicans and 20% of self-identified Democrats hold opinions on gun control that directly contradict the positions of the political party to which they belong.
Because the study in question here used a general political scale and party self-identification, many people will be identified as favoring gun control even if they did not do so. There are good reasons for this—I’d accuse the study of priming its subjects, if the authors asked about beliefs on gun control directly before asking about a hypothetical study on gun control—but it’s an important thing to note, and the study largely skims over it.
That’s most immediately important, because if you take that 30% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats, and then try to think about ways they could tilt the results of the study, you end up with the possibility that politically-motivated innumeracy might cause people to do worse at a math question than flipping a coin. At a deeper level, that sort of party identification meaning us-versus-them is kinda a big reason political discourse is so shallow these days.