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...
And J.S. Mill's flippant remark to Pakington finds another home...
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
It is, of course, a misleading question.
ReplyDeletehttp://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.