Thursday, July 10, 2008

The Stupid Party

I seem to recall a survey a while back that showed the more Fox News you watched, the less you actually knew about the world, but I don't have a link. Here's another series of studies showing that the more informed you are as a conservative, the less informed you are about objective reality.

I'd be interested in knowing how many conservatives still think there are WMDs in Iraq...

3 comments:

Charles Fulton said...

And J.S. Mill's flippant remark to Pakington finds another home...

Anonymous said...

The study doesn't prove much because, at its base, it used a fact ("inequality between rich and poor") commonly used as a preface to suggest some sort of socialist reform. A knee-jerk conservative with a lot of political knowledge will recognize the statement as a vehicle for socialism and reject it out of hand.

I suspect if you did the same study but asked, "True or false: the government's revenue increased after the 2003 Bush tax cuts", you'd see an opposite trend of knee-jerk rejection of fact, but on the liberal side.

Matthew Carroll-Schmidt said...

It is, of course, a misleading question.

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html

It's not at all surprising that Conservatives and Liberals disagree on the facts, what's interesting is the relationship of information consumption and objective knowledge.