Harper's is a great source of entertainment. I must have unsubscribed at some point, finding dumbth in the world is too easy and gets boring. "People make large, systematic errors when judging party composition, considerably overestimating the extent to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups," they wrote. Democrats thought that 44.1% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year. The actual proportion is 2.2%. They also thought that 44.2% of Republicans are 65 or older, more than twice as high as the actual percentage of 21.3%. They were a little better at guessing how many GOP members are Evangelicals or Southerners, only overestimating those categories by about nine points. Republicans were even worse at guessing the composition of the Democratic party. They guessed that 46.4% of Democrats are black. The real value is 23.9%. They further estimated that 43.5% are union members, 38.2% are LGBT, and 35.7% are atheist or agnostic. In order, the actual values are 10.5%, 6.3%, and 8.7%. Ahler and Sood replicated these findings in three more studies conducted with Amazon's Mechanical Turk... Surveys are poor sources of evidence, and paid online surveys may be the worst. I don't dispute that many people have stupid ideas, but this author does not distinguish himself as above average. The source is a YouGov survey which asked if "Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings." To me this brings to mind the Epstein case, the court documents of which named high-level politicians like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. "There’s no indication that any of the individuals named in the sealed court documents had any knowledge of or any involvement with Epstein’s alleged crimes" but perhaps in the popular imagination "high-level Democrats" like Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. George Mitchell are "involved" simply by being named in the case. If it seems that politics makes people stupider, perhaps we should ask how our own thinking is distorted, rather than repeating the familiar list of dumb things the other side says: "vaccination causes autism, or that prominent politicians and movie stars are involved in a cannibalistic paedophile ring, or that climate change is a hoax or that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election." How about a look at the ideas that genetically modified organisms are harmful, or nuclear power is more dangerous than alternatives, or recycling is a worthwhile activity, or "no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change"? Isn't the Doomsday Clock running a bit behind?Here’s a sample from this month: “Percentage of Democrats that Republicans believe are atheist or agnostic: 36. Percentage that are: Nine.”
Ahler and Sood found that party members' perceptions of each other were vastly out of step with reality.
“Proportion of Republicans who believe high-level Democrats run a child sex-trafficking ring: Half.” Half of American Republicans think Democrat leaders are paedophiles! Good grief.