This
study concludes that people on both the left and the right overestimate the extreme views of their opponents. The effect is less marked for those who are not very engaged politically. The upshot is that people on either side of the political divide probably have more views in common than they realize.
Someone proposed a Political Turing Test....the idea is: Can you express the political views of your opponents with reasonable accuracy? (and, I would add, support those views via whatever arguments can logically be made for them)
ReplyDeleteI suspect that Progs are generally much less good at this than are their opponents.
Hope that study is right.
ReplyDelete"You might think that people who regularly read the news are more informed about their political opponents. In fact, the opposite is the case."
ReplyDeleteYes, that much I believe to be true.
"Education is intended to make us better informed about the world, so we’d expect that the more educated you become, the more you understand what other Americans think. In fact, the more educated a person is, the worse their Perception Gap – with one critical exception. This trend only holds true for Democrats, not Republicans."
ReplyDeleteYes, I also believe that -- although I think it's properly 'conservatives' rather than 'Republicans.' Education very much helps you understand how the left thinks, because that's what they're there to teach you. They don't know, or care, what Republicans/conservatives think. They're happier with their imaginations than with reality, as in the imagination they get to be comfortably on the side of Justice and Decency, opposed to evil and venal people who only care for money and the chance to oppress the weak.
Volokh Conspiracy talked about such a Turing Test about 5 years ago, but no one could find that it had ever been tried. However, Jonathan Haidt's work, showing that conservatives are much better at predicting the motives and reasoning of liberals than vice versa was quote often.
ReplyDeleteI fear this is one place where social media has done us a grave disservice. If people actually do start talking and trying to learn about "the other side," the fringes raise such Cain and threaten so loudly that most people withdraw. I see it more on the Progressive side of the 'net than on the conservative, although I suspect it happens everywhere.
ReplyDeleteI think of it as the modern version of "If I ever hear about you talking to one of those girls from [town up the road], you'll never go out with my daughter again. Everyone knows those Bohemians are fast." [With a strong implication that anyone who associated with the Czechs from the next town was automatically morally suspect]. This was in Nebraska prior to WWII.
LittleRed1
Given the leftward tilt of both mass and social media, everybody marinates in the approved narrative. It doesn't surprise me at all that liberals can't describe conservative motivation or reasoning. They only hear the gross caricatures of it.
ReplyDeleteI'd be more worried about it (although I do make it a point to follow people on twitter I don't agree with to keep my bubble permeable), but the things we used to consider fringe left have now largely become mainstream left, and even culturally mainstream, and things we never even imagined seriously are now mainstream left or close to it. I don't think it's entirely wrong to think the left is represented by their fringe.
ReplyDelete