14 ms·

Do you have a yawning Perception Gap, or are you in sync with American public?

76 points by ozdave 7y ago

Chazprime 7y ago
I never realized I was in a majority group, but "Exhausted" is exactly how I feel about politics lately. I'm capping my CNN viewing at about ~20 minutes a day.
- Erik816 7y ago
  That's about 20 minutes too much if you're exhausted by politics in my opinion. Do you get any value out of it? If not, just stop watching.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  As someone who is more recently interested in politics, I skip CNN, and actually all cable/televised news, because the coverage is so shallow. If it exhausts you, but you still want to follow it to any degree, I'd recommend getting your politics through cultivated written sources.
  - Chazprime 7y ago
    That's usually what I do now, but my husband likes to watch CNN or MSNBC at night so there's always some leakage.
- losteric 7y ago
  I'm exhausted because the flow of information far exceeds and even inhibits any effective response. Death by a thousand paper cuts... the many public factions immobilized by each focusing on their most recent and painful cut.
baggy_trough 7y ago
If 30% of a population holds a view, it shouldn't be described as "extreme".
- ksdale 7y ago
  I believe the graphic just says that 30% hold some view that is extreme, not that 30% believe the same extreme thing.
- powrtoch 7y ago
  30% of the population holding extreme views isn't the same as any particular view being held by 30% and considered "extreme". They don't go into exactly what this figure means, but at the least we can imagine 15% of Americans holding one extreme and 15% holding the opposite extreme. Or even more credibly, it could mean that 30% of people hold at least one "extreme" view, but each individual "extreme" view is only held by 1-2%.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Disregarding the article's intent with that statistic entirely... A) a "population" can be 1 person, a random demographic, a continent, or a fringe religious group. It just means a mathematical set of people. B) while one could argue for or against universal moral truths until they're blue in the face, from a practical standpoint there are absolutely views that large populations believe in that are objectively abhorrent. FGM, killing people for their religion, torturing immigrant children, etc.
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy in Illinois [1] 1. https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-met-illinois-3rd-district-nazi-arthur-jones-20181106-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-met-ill...
wool_gather 7y ago
This is quite interesting. One question that springs to mind, though: who exactly are the respondents thinking of when they're asked to estimate? Do they hear "Are (Democrats|Republicans) $SOME_TRAIT?" and think "Is (Nancy Pelosi|Mitch McConnell) $SOME_TRAIT?", or "Is my kid's study buddy's (Democrat|Republican) parent $SOME_TRAIT?" There's always a big difference in how you judge someone you know personally as opposed to a face on the news. This doesn't seem to have been asked, or at least it's not mentioned in the article.
- jerf 7y ago
  I was thinking that probably played a role as well. The extreme partisans on one side will be exposed to the opinions of the extreme partisans on the other, and ignoring the namecalling for a moment, it would be interesting to see if the extremists are accurate about what the other side's extremists believe. I don't think that would change very much about this report overall; I'm sure both extremists would still overestimate the size of the extremists groups on both sides quite significantly. But it would be an interesting data point.
LyndsySimon 7y ago
Overall, I think this is a very interesting article and raises some good points. I did have some questions though. Why are "Traditional Liberals" part of the "Exhausted Majority", but "Traditional Conservatives" part of the "Wings"? This is particularly confusing to me because the latter is the second largest of all groups. In fact, if I'm reading their chart correct, they seem to be claiming that anyone who identifies as "conservative" is part of the "wing"...
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  I would argue that "traditional" conservatism has been pushed to the outskirts of the current Republican party, in a way that isn't (currently) matched in the Democratic party. Folks like George Will, for example. https://reason.com/2016/06/25/george-will-leaves-the-republican-party/ https://reason.com/2016/06/25/george-will-leaves-the-republi...
  - LyndsySimon 7y ago
    Hmm. My feelings on this are kind of muddled, mostly due to my own biases. I'm very much a libertarian (technically, an anarcho-capitalist) but feel much more affinity for the GOP than the Democrats. Objectively, I share about the same amount with each party but I have lived the vast majority of my life in very conservative communities. One of the things I didn't mention that bothered me about the article was that it excluded pretty much all of the minority factions in American politics, such as libertarians. I thought that the article was about Democrat vs. Republican, so that sorta made sense... but reading the hiddentribes.us site that it references, now I'm not so sure. Their categorization seems forced to me.
    - mLuby 7y ago
      Agreed. Where's my Grey Tribe at? Also would have been nice to see what Dems and Reps think of independents: are they viewed as centrist wafflers or unmoored radicals?
    - Izkata 7y ago
      Libertarians fall under Classical Liberals.
ceejayoz 7y ago
Some of these "perception gaps" may be definitional. For example, the "racism still exists in America" question. A right-wing person may say "racism exists, but it targets white people now". A left-wing person might see that as a denial of racism's existence. You'd get a fundamental disagreement on what the answer meant.
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
  Absolutely. I don't see any of this in their analysis of the results.
drngdds 7y ago
I thought I was having a stroke looking at that title until I realized that "yawning" also means "wide."
woopwoop 7y ago
Maybe this is just my partisanship, but the misperceptions on the conservative side seem much more egregious than the misperceptions on the liberal side. Liberal misperceptions are of the form of wishy-washy statements such as "racism still exists in America". Of course two different people can say that they agree with this statement while meaning fantastically different things. On the other hand, one of the conservative misperceptions is that the sizable majority of Democrats take the concrete, extreme position of being in favor of completely open borders. I'm a Democrat, and I actually do hold this extreme position. I can tell you the vast majority of Democrats who I've ever talked to disagree with me strongly about this; it doesn't even pass the sniff test. I fail to see any misperception on the Democratic side which is even close to being this severe.
- tspike 7y ago
  I agree they could pick a better question. It's not interesting to know how many people agree with that statement. However, it is very interesting that Democrats actually thought that Republicans would not agree with that statement
  - woopwoop 7y ago
    Perhaps, but there's two ways that this can be interpreted. One is that Democrats have a misperception about Republicans' beliefs on this issue. I'm sure to some extent this is true. The other, though, is that Democrats and Republicans interpret this statement in different ways. So Democrats believe the statement means X, and Republicans believe it means Y. Republicans tend to agree with X and disagree with Y. Democrats may have an accurate view of how Republicans feel about beliefs X and Y, but still underestimate how many Republicans agree with the statement.
    - asark 7y ago
      Interviewer: "Will Republicans say the sky is blue?" Democrat: "No." Republican: "Of course it's blue. It's hot pink, which is a shade of blue." Democrat: "... wait, what? You think... huh?" Interviewer: "Looks like the Democrat was wrong!" Which is true... ish. Truthy.
supergauntlet 7y ago
These questions are meaningless. Seriously? They asked a question like "Does racism still exist in America?" and thought many people were going to say no? Democrats and Republicans both agree there are problems. The difference is in their solutions. If you ask a facile question like "Is homelessness bad" of course both sides will agree. The difference is that the Republican solution is criminalizing homelessness and other things that treat the symptoms, or handwaving it away and "letting the free market fix it." That doesn't even get into all the ways Republicans repeatedly will defund and undermine any government program, no matter how well they're working. (They're trying to cut SNAP for fucks sake. Over 40% of SNAP recipients are children!) Meanwhile Democrats will make mistakes and get caught in bureaucracy but at least actually make an effort at attacking the cause. Even if you virulently disagree with me on my characterization of the two parties, you have to agree that the linked article is meaningless. The fact that "both sides agree" on the problems means nothing if one side's solutions aren't fact-based.
- tspike 7y ago
  > and thought many people were going to say no? Apparently, many Democrats thought Republicans would say no. That's what's being measured.
  - CriticalCathed 7y ago
    But that is because, for example, many republicans (7/10?)[0] think that the democrats are racist but they are more likely to consider democrats discriminating against whites. A republican is more likely to say that sexism exists, but against men, rather than women. A republican is more likely to say that climate change exists, but isn't anthropogenic -- which is tantamount to climate change denial. The definition of what "properly controlled immigration" means is also unclear; for a republican it may be more likely to mean only let white people in or to reject all muslims. To be clear I'm not saying that all republicans believe these things, it's only that there is at the very least an extremely vocal group of people on the right who would answer these questions in the same way as someone on the left, but for vastly different reasons. The definitions of what these words actually mean are in dispute between the two groups. Someone on the left may be answering the question as "what do they actually believe, regardless of how they would answer the question." I know that's how I'd reply to a survey like this. I certainly wouldn't have in the moment considered if they would have a warped view of the words. >[0] https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png (Am I mischaracterizing this graph with respect to racism?) side note, I fall into the post-doc group who would say that my colleagues and friends generally agree with me politically. But from my perspective, it's because we are more united on what the right ways to handle the problems actually are rather than because we are politically isolated. I consider myself a libertarian, but I generally vote blue; I've got friends who disagree with my general ideological stances but who understand that particular policies are better than nothing. I think that the story that this [1] graph is telling is that the more educated you become, the more you realize that only one of two parties in the united states is proposing sane solutions to the problems we face; whereas republicans in general are the ones who have a perception gap. Probably because they're more likely to be misinformed by the media they consume. [2] [1] https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png [2] https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png
ocschwar 7y ago
I am extremely out sync. I ride my bike every day right through the heart of alleged MS-13 territory. The American public thinks I've been shot into Swiss cheese by now.
- mLuby 7y ago
  Thoughts and prayers!
  - ocschwar 7y ago
    Very helpful!
DiabloD3 7y ago
All this thing is telling me is anyone who is a self-defined member of a party, no matter if it is Democrat, Republican, Liberal, or whatever, hold "extreme views", where that is defined as being a grittier bolder version of reality; to put it bluntly, this thing tells me that people who are "into" politics are trolls, and should be avoided, no matter which party they subscribe to. I mean, it calls itself "The Perception Gap", except there really isn't any such thing by the way they describe it: half the things they ask about are factual things (such as the second amendment (it doesn't matter if you personally think we shouldn't bare arms, it is in the Constitution on how and when to do so), or America being a socialist country (FDR made America adopt many Socialist ideals, forming a hybrid of modern Socialism and our existing Democratic Republic, to fill the gaps in one with the other)); the other half are just polarizing issues that are complex, nuanced, and not something you merely can ask on a simple questionnaire. The whole article says things that are true, but tries to build a narrative around those things that doesn't quite function. For it to be effective, imo, it should just straight out claim people don't like the truth, don't like the reality they live in, and have chosen to ignore it or recontextualize it into something more palatable instead of accepting it: reality is still real, even when you don't believe in it. The truth is: our politics are shaped by people who live in pure fantasy, they are allowed to vote, even though they aren't even capable of understanding what they are voting on, or what the outcome will actually mean (ex: Trump protest votes helped get Trump elected, even though the people making the protest votes readily admitted Trump was a bad candidate and would not make a good President), and the article just dances around the issue instead of nailing it.
tspike 7y ago
I love this angle. There's a lot of room to improve the methodology, but this is getting at the heart of the question of why we are seeing increasingly polarized politics. With a wide perception gap, we are guaranteed to be framing our opponents' views inaccurately and therefore fighting the wrong battles if movement at a societal level is actually what is desired. The more politically diverse your direct in-person interactions are, the better your perception gap, and the more likely you are to be able to accurately frame your opponents' arguments when debating with them.
abathur 7y ago
I wonder if there's definitional confusion underlying this? I rarely see discussion of the gaps that hide under an umbrella like <party/ideology>-ans. Are we talking about candidates and office-holders? Party officials and operatives? Openly-affiliated pundits? Activists? People otherwise not on the playing field who happen to vote for or be registered as party-affiliated? Abstract stereotypes projected by partisan media? In practice, these groups may be largely distinct, and questions referencing them can easily smuggle a lot of assumptions in. I would be surprised if highly disengaged voters and highly engaged ones aren't talking about different things when they tell you what they think <X>-ans think, so you'd expect a delta.
- abathur 7y ago
  There's also a lot of dogma/orthodoxy that elected <X>-ans have to at least pay lip-service to, which might exacerbate perceived gaps on issues that are often in the talking points/propaganda efforts/purity tests. Aside from nailing down who the questions mean, it might be interesting to see how well respondents can imagine what partisans think about obscure concrete issues.
gavanwoolery 7y ago
This falls right in line with the concept of cognitive dissonance [1]. In short, people want the world to fit their narrative, not the other way around. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
- vore 7y ago
  How is this cognitive dissonance? The people being surveyed aren't holding conflicting opinions within themselves.
  - gavanwoolery 7y ago
    The cognitive dissonance I have observed is in real-world observations vs other data (social media, news, etc). Basically, if you follow the news frequently, you'd be inclined to think the world was on fire because that's what gets the clicks. But if you observe the world around you, talk to real-world people of differing political opinions, you will find that everything is relatively tame compared to the picture people are inclined to paint.
moate 7y ago
"Properly controlled immigration can be good for America" is a meaningless question. Of course Democrats would think Republicans would be opposed to this idea. The idea of "proper control" is the whole debate! We have republicans who feel that building a wall is part of properly controlling things and democrats who think it's a moral outrage. Several of these questions are phrased so as to make them non-partisan and in doing so create a "bad people on both sides" effect. Vague statements like this create bad sociology my friends! This isn't about a perception gap. It's about not putting together very good polling questions and then drawing some conclusions based on them.
fallingfrog 7y ago
It’s really important to understand that ideology does not arise in a vacuum; it is an expression of one’s material conditions. For example if you tell me you believe that taxation is theft and the free market will solve your problems, I can reasonably guess that you are the owner of some business for whom labor is just a cost and taxation to support public goods is going to cost you more than it benefits you. That includes everyone from corporate interests down to small business owners. The rest of the republican base is those who can be induced to be allies of the above on the basis of race. Keep that in mind and all their ideological positions suddenly make sense. They’re just looking out for number one. Even the immigration stuff; labor is at a disadvantage when capital can move freely but labor is stuck. This is also the reason that the extreme right has often had corporate sponsorship at key moments in history.
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  I agree with you except on a small point - I don't think restricting labor movement is particularly beneficial to capital - but I don't see much relevance to the article.
  - fallingfrog 7y ago
    I felt that the article was trying to paper over genuine conflicts by making them just look like thinly held opinions. The message is: don’t fight, it’s not a real difference, it’s just slightly different ideas. That’s just false- a hen can’t be allies with a fox. If people are going to fight for themselves they have to know who their enemies are and why those people are their enemies. To make the point even more explicit- who do you suppose funds More In Common, and why do you suppose they do that?
    - slowmovintarget 7y ago
      The message of the article is _we are not enemies_ not "don't fight." Fellow Americans should be able to disagree and settle the conflict with elections. Enemies wish for each other's destruction, and while it may be how you feel, it is not the right frame of mind to take when attempting exchange of ideas on policy.
sudosteph 7y ago
Interesting, I wonder if the width of the perception gap varies significantly by geography. I'd hypothesize that the perception gap would be smaller in the regions identified here as "more politically tolerant" - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-counties-vary-their-degree-partisan-prejudice/583072/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-coun... , just due to the fact that living and interacting with people with more varied opinions may make people more in-tune with what members of the opposing political party actually believe. Would be cool to an analysis of the data to see if that correlation actually holds.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
Interesting piece. I would quibble with one part. At the end they imply that the contention in the country is reconcilable because the extremes do not represent the majority. Now the last time Americans had an irreconcilable difference was the Civil War. We do not have good statistics from that time but there is some evidence that the extreme positions (i.e. abolition vs. pan-American slavery) were not held by a majority of the people in the country. One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist. I guess my point is that just because the extremes are confused about how America feels, that doesn't mean they aren't driving us towards irreconcilable conflict. Now, I'm not one of those that thinks an intra-American conflict is forthcoming. But I would guess that if you modeled various internal conflicts throughout the history of nations, you wouldn't find many where roughly half the population stood solidly behind one idea and the half stood firmly behind another. I think in most you'd actually find something a lot like this. Two outlying groups driving the discourse against each other and a constituency of allies on each side that can't break away for various reasons.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist. Many assuredly weren't abolitionists, at least not as a matter of policy. The Corwin Amendment [1] was even passed by the 2/3 majority in the remaining senate and ratified by some northern states. Don't forget, Maryland was a slave state and fought on the side of the north. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment
harimau777 7y ago
Not directly what the article is talking about, but I feel like this is related: I recently spoke to a man who used to work for the Republican party. He felt that politics is so polarized because the two parties aren't even talking about the same things. The example he gave is that it's not possible for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on racial inequality, because the Republican party simply doesn't have that as part of their platform.
- sudosteph 7y ago
  Yeah, that's a particularly tough one because the most obvious laws about racial inequality (equal access to housing, jobs, education) were passed a while ago. Today if you want to address racial inequality via legislation, that means police reform and drug policy. When you talk about those subjects to someone who isn't either directly affected by them or well-educated about them, they don't seem on their face to be related to racial inequality. Only recently do you see republicans starting to talk (a little) about drug policy changes now that opioid abuse has started becoming a huge problem in some white communities. Video camera footage of police abuse may also help eventually bring republicans in on that problem - but that is dependent on cops having working cameras, not turning them off, and the people watching the video actually having empathy for the people being abused. Maybe if cops started harassing vocal 2nd amendment advocates their tune would change.
gremlinsinc 7y ago
The fact that they count Breitbart, and Redstate as 'news sources' skews the study a bit. Of course people who read that crap are going to have a larger perception gap. Even Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed skew more to the left. That's their reader-base, they are going to tailor pieces to keep the readers they have who lean progressive. I think they should've kept news sources to only nbc/cbs/cnn/cnbc/abc/hn as those are really the most conservative (not meaning GOP but 'reserved') news agencies that tend to (at least try to appear) non biased. Fox is definitely biased right, and MSNBC (which is what I watch) I agree skews left of center. I think if we brought back the Fairness doctrine that would help a lot but I don't know if we could enforce that on the internet or if we should. I'm a social democrat (not for full socialism, for social democracy like Denmark/France/Germany), but I can definitely see the perception gap for what it is, and it's causes. Our media system is broken. It's a propaganda machine that is controlled by multiple parties with no middle ground. A fairness doctrine would at least allow all sides of an issue to be represented and temper the propaganda machines. There are billionaires and Super PACS on both sides that are working to divide us. In fact there's some albeit conspiracy-sounding theories that the elite want us divided by fringe issues like abortion/gun control/immigration so we don't band together on worker rights, labor unions, healthcare, etc that would force them to funnel money at the bottom and switch from trickle down to trickle up economy. As long as we're hating each other and have these misperceptions and polarizations we're easy sheep to control.
erobbins 7y ago
I think this "study" is crap. On one side, you have armed terrorists threatening a state legislature, and on the other side you have... what? The gap isn't in perception, it's in civilized behavior.

76 points by ozdave 7y ago

I never realized I was in a majority group, but "Exhausted" is exactly how I feel about politics lately. I'm capping my CNN viewing at about ~20 minutes a day.

Erik816 7y ago
That's about 20 minutes too much if you're exhausted by politics in my opinion. Do you get any value out of it? If not, just stop watching.
dv_dt 7y ago
As someone who is more recently interested in politics, I skip CNN, and actually all cable/televised news, because the coverage is so shallow. If it exhausts you, but you still want to follow it to any degree, I'd recommend getting your politics through cultivated written sources.
- Chazprime 7y ago
  That's usually what I do now, but my husband likes to watch CNN or MSNBC at night so there's always some leakage.
losteric 7y ago
I'm exhausted because the flow of information far exceeds and even inhibits any effective response. Death by a thousand paper cuts... the many public factions immobilized by each focusing on their most recent and painful cut.

baggy_trough 7y ago

If 30% of a population holds a view, it shouldn't be described as "extreme".

ksdale 7y ago
I believe the graphic just says that 30% hold some view that is extreme, not that 30% believe the same extreme thing.
powrtoch 7y ago
30% of the population holding extreme views isn't the same as any particular view being held by 30% and considered "extreme". They don't go into exactly what this figure means, but at the least we can imagine 15% of Americans holding one extreme and 15% holding the opposite extreme. Or even more credibly, it could mean that 30% of people hold at least one "extreme" view, but each individual "extreme" view is only held by 1-2%.
AWildC182 7y ago
Disregarding the article's intent with that statistic entirely... A) a "population" can be 1 person, a random demographic, a continent, or a fringe religious group. It just means a mathematical set of people. B) while one could argue for or against universal moral truths until they're blue in the face, from a practical standpoint there are absolutely views that large populations believe in that are objectively abhorrent. FGM, killing people for their religion, torturing immigrant children, etc.
hindsightbias 7y ago
Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy in Illinois [1] 1. https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-met-illinois-3rd-district-nazi-arthur-jones-20181106-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-met-ill...

wool_gather 7y ago

This is quite interesting. One question that springs to mind, though: who exactly are the respondents thinking of when they're asked to estimate? Do they hear "Are (Democrats|Republicans) $SOME_TRAIT?" and think "Is (Nancy Pelosi|Mitch McConnell) $SOME_TRAIT?", or "Is my kid's study buddy's (Democrat|Republican) parent $SOME_TRAIT?" There's always a big difference in how you judge someone you know personally as opposed to a face on the news. This doesn't seem to have been asked, or at least it's not mentioned in the article.

jerf 7y ago
I was thinking that probably played a role as well. The extreme partisans on one side will be exposed to the opinions of the extreme partisans on the other, and ignoring the namecalling for a moment, it would be interesting to see if the extremists are accurate about what the other side's extremists believe. I don't think that would change very much about this report overall; I'm sure both extremists would still overestimate the size of the extremists groups on both sides quite significantly. But it would be an interesting data point.

LyndsySimon 7y ago

Overall, I think this is a very interesting article and raises some good points. I did have some questions though. Why are "Traditional Liberals" part of the "Exhausted Majority", but "Traditional Conservatives" part of the "Wings"? This is particularly confusing to me because the latter is the second largest of all groups. In fact, if I'm reading their chart correct, they seem to be claiming that anyone who identifies as "conservative" is part of the "wing"...

ceejayoz 7y ago
I would argue that "traditional" conservatism has been pushed to the outskirts of the current Republican party, in a way that isn't (currently) matched in the Democratic party. Folks like George Will, for example. https://reason.com/2016/06/25/george-will-leaves-the-republican-party/ https://reason.com/2016/06/25/george-will-leaves-the-republi...
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  Hmm. My feelings on this are kind of muddled, mostly due to my own biases. I'm very much a libertarian (technically, an anarcho-capitalist) but feel much more affinity for the GOP than the Democrats. Objectively, I share about the same amount with each party but I have lived the vast majority of my life in very conservative communities. One of the things I didn't mention that bothered me about the article was that it excluded pretty much all of the minority factions in American politics, such as libertarians. I thought that the article was about Democrat vs. Republican, so that sorta made sense... but reading the hiddentribes.us site that it references, now I'm not so sure. Their categorization seems forced to me.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    Agreed. Where's my Grey Tribe at? Also would have been nice to see what Dems and Reps think of independents: are they viewed as centrist wafflers or unmoored radicals?
  - Izkata 7y ago
    Libertarians fall under Classical Liberals.

ceejayoz 7y ago

Some of these "perception gaps" may be definitional. For example, the "racism still exists in America" question. A right-wing person may say "racism exists, but it targets white people now". A left-wing person might see that as a denial of racism's existence. You'd get a fundamental disagreement on what the answer meant.

CriticalCathed 7y ago
Absolutely. I don't see any of this in their analysis of the results.

drngdds 7y ago

I thought I was having a stroke looking at that title until I realized that "yawning" also means "wide."

woopwoop 7y ago

Maybe this is just my partisanship, but the misperceptions on the conservative side seem much more egregious than the misperceptions on the liberal side. Liberal misperceptions are of the form of wishy-washy statements such as "racism still exists in America". Of course two different people can say that they agree with this statement while meaning fantastically different things. On the other hand, one of the conservative misperceptions is that the sizable majority of Democrats take the concrete, extreme position of being in favor of completely open borders. I'm a Democrat, and I actually do hold this extreme position. I can tell you the vast majority of Democrats who I've ever talked to disagree with me strongly about this; it doesn't even pass the sniff test. I fail to see any misperception on the Democratic side which is even close to being this severe.

tspike 7y ago
I agree they could pick a better question. It's not interesting to know how many people agree with that statement. However, it is very interesting that Democrats actually thought that Republicans would not agree with that statement
- woopwoop 7y ago
  Perhaps, but there's two ways that this can be interpreted. One is that Democrats have a misperception about Republicans' beliefs on this issue. I'm sure to some extent this is true. The other, though, is that Democrats and Republicans interpret this statement in different ways. So Democrats believe the statement means X, and Republicans believe it means Y. Republicans tend to agree with X and disagree with Y. Democrats may have an accurate view of how Republicans feel about beliefs X and Y, but still underestimate how many Republicans agree with the statement.
  - asark 7y ago
    Interviewer: "Will Republicans say the sky is blue?" Democrat: "No." Republican: "Of course it's blue. It's hot pink, which is a shade of blue." Democrat: "... wait, what? You think... huh?" Interviewer: "Looks like the Democrat was wrong!" Which is true... ish. Truthy.

supergauntlet 7y ago

These questions are meaningless. Seriously? They asked a question like "Does racism still exist in America?" and thought many people were going to say no? Democrats and Republicans both agree there are problems. The difference is in their solutions. If you ask a facile question like "Is homelessness bad" of course both sides will agree. The difference is that the Republican solution is criminalizing homelessness and other things that treat the symptoms, or handwaving it away and "letting the free market fix it." That doesn't even get into all the ways Republicans repeatedly will defund and undermine any government program, no matter how well they're working. (They're trying to cut SNAP for fucks sake. Over 40% of SNAP recipients are children!) Meanwhile Democrats will make mistakes and get caught in bureaucracy but at least actually make an effort at attacking the cause. Even if you virulently disagree with me on my characterization of the two parties, you have to agree that the linked article is meaningless. The fact that "both sides agree" on the problems means nothing if one side's solutions aren't fact-based.

tspike 7y ago
> and thought many people were going to say no? Apparently, many Democrats thought Republicans would say no. That's what's being measured.
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
  But that is because, for example, many republicans (7/10?)[0] think that the democrats are racist but they are more likely to consider democrats discriminating against whites. A republican is more likely to say that sexism exists, but against men, rather than women. A republican is more likely to say that climate change exists, but isn't anthropogenic -- which is tantamount to climate change denial. The definition of what "properly controlled immigration" means is also unclear; for a republican it may be more likely to mean only let white people in or to reject all muslims. To be clear I'm not saying that all republicans believe these things, it's only that there is at the very least an extremely vocal group of people on the right who would answer these questions in the same way as someone on the left, but for vastly different reasons. The definitions of what these words actually mean are in dispute between the two groups. Someone on the left may be answering the question as "what do they actually believe, regardless of how they would answer the question." I know that's how I'd reply to a survey like this. I certainly wouldn't have in the moment considered if they would have a warped view of the words. >[0] https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png (Am I mischaracterizing this graph with respect to racism?) side note, I fall into the post-doc group who would say that my colleagues and friends generally agree with me politically. But from my perspective, it's because we are more united on what the right ways to handle the problems actually are rather than because we are politically isolated. I consider myself a libertarian, but I generally vote blue; I've got friends who disagree with my general ideological stances but who understand that particular policies are better than nothing. I think that the story that this [1] graph is telling is that the more educated you become, the more you realize that only one of two parties in the united states is proposing sane solutions to the problems we face; whereas republicans in general are the ones who have a perception gap. Probably because they're more likely to be misinformed by the media they consume. [2] [1] https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png [2] https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png

ocschwar 7y ago

I am extremely out sync. I ride my bike every day right through the heart of alleged MS-13 territory. The American public thinks I've been shot into Swiss cheese by now.

mLuby 7y ago
Thoughts and prayers!
- ocschwar 7y ago
  Very helpful!

DiabloD3 7y ago

All this thing is telling me is anyone who is a self-defined member of a party, no matter if it is Democrat, Republican, Liberal, or whatever, hold "extreme views", where that is defined as being a grittier bolder version of reality; to put it bluntly, this thing tells me that people who are "into" politics are trolls, and should be avoided, no matter which party they subscribe to. I mean, it calls itself "The Perception Gap", except there really isn't any such thing by the way they describe it: half the things they ask about are factual things (such as the second amendment (it doesn't matter if you personally think we shouldn't bare arms, it is in the Constitution on how and when to do so), or America being a socialist country (FDR made America adopt many Socialist ideals, forming a hybrid of modern Socialism and our existing Democratic Republic, to fill the gaps in one with the other)); the other half are just polarizing issues that are complex, nuanced, and not something you merely can ask on a simple questionnaire. The whole article says things that are true, but tries to build a narrative around those things that doesn't quite function. For it to be effective, imo, it should just straight out claim people don't like the truth, don't like the reality they live in, and have chosen to ignore it or recontextualize it into something more palatable instead of accepting it: reality is still real, even when you don't believe in it. The truth is: our politics are shaped by people who live in pure fantasy, they are allowed to vote, even though they aren't even capable of understanding what they are voting on, or what the outcome will actually mean (ex: Trump protest votes helped get Trump elected, even though the people making the protest votes readily admitted Trump was a bad candidate and would not make a good President), and the article just dances around the issue instead of nailing it.

tspike 7y ago

I love this angle. There's a lot of room to improve the methodology, but this is getting at the heart of the question of why we are seeing increasingly polarized politics. With a wide perception gap, we are guaranteed to be framing our opponents' views inaccurately and therefore fighting the wrong battles if movement at a societal level is actually what is desired. The more politically diverse your direct in-person interactions are, the better your perception gap, and the more likely you are to be able to accurately frame your opponents' arguments when debating with them.

abathur 7y ago

I wonder if there's definitional confusion underlying this? I rarely see discussion of the gaps that hide under an umbrella like <party/ideology>-ans. Are we talking about candidates and office-holders? Party officials and operatives? Openly-affiliated pundits? Activists? People otherwise not on the playing field who happen to vote for or be registered as party-affiliated? Abstract stereotypes projected by partisan media? In practice, these groups may be largely distinct, and questions referencing them can easily smuggle a lot of assumptions in. I would be surprised if highly disengaged voters and highly engaged ones aren't talking about different things when they tell you what they think <X>-ans think, so you'd expect a delta.

abathur 7y ago
There's also a lot of dogma/orthodoxy that elected <X>-ans have to at least pay lip-service to, which might exacerbate perceived gaps on issues that are often in the talking points/propaganda efforts/purity tests. Aside from nailing down who the questions mean, it might be interesting to see how well respondents can imagine what partisans think about obscure concrete issues.

gavanwoolery 7y ago

This falls right in line with the concept of cognitive dissonance [1]. In short, people want the world to fit their narrative, not the other way around. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

vore 7y ago
How is this cognitive dissonance? The people being surveyed aren't holding conflicting opinions within themselves.
- gavanwoolery 7y ago
  The cognitive dissonance I have observed is in real-world observations vs other data (social media, news, etc). Basically, if you follow the news frequently, you'd be inclined to think the world was on fire because that's what gets the clicks. But if you observe the world around you, talk to real-world people of differing political opinions, you will find that everything is relatively tame compared to the picture people are inclined to paint.

moate 7y ago

"Properly controlled immigration can be good for America" is a meaningless question. Of course Democrats would think Republicans would be opposed to this idea. The idea of "proper control" is the whole debate! We have republicans who feel that building a wall is part of properly controlling things and democrats who think it's a moral outrage. Several of these questions are phrased so as to make them non-partisan and in doing so create a "bad people on both sides" effect. Vague statements like this create bad sociology my friends! This isn't about a perception gap. It's about not putting together very good polling questions and then drawing some conclusions based on them.

fallingfrog 7y ago

It’s really important to understand that ideology does not arise in a vacuum; it is an expression of one’s material conditions. For example if you tell me you believe that taxation is theft and the free market will solve your problems, I can reasonably guess that you are the owner of some business for whom labor is just a cost and taxation to support public goods is going to cost you more than it benefits you. That includes everyone from corporate interests down to small business owners. The rest of the republican base is those who can be induced to be allies of the above on the basis of race. Keep that in mind and all their ideological positions suddenly make sense. They’re just looking out for number one. Even the immigration stuff; labor is at a disadvantage when capital can move freely but labor is stuck. This is also the reason that the extreme right has often had corporate sponsorship at key moments in history.

aoeusnth1 7y ago
I agree with you except on a small point - I don't think restricting labor movement is particularly beneficial to capital - but I don't see much relevance to the article.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  I felt that the article was trying to paper over genuine conflicts by making them just look like thinly held opinions. The message is: don’t fight, it’s not a real difference, it’s just slightly different ideas. That’s just false- a hen can’t be allies with a fox. If people are going to fight for themselves they have to know who their enemies are and why those people are their enemies. To make the point even more explicit- who do you suppose funds More In Common, and why do you suppose they do that?
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    The message of the article is _we are not enemies_ not "don't fight." Fellow Americans should be able to disagree and settle the conflict with elections. Enemies wish for each other's destruction, and while it may be how you feel, it is not the right frame of mind to take when attempting exchange of ideas on policy.

sudosteph 7y ago

Interesting, I wonder if the width of the perception gap varies significantly by geography. I'd hypothesize that the perception gap would be smaller in the regions identified here as "more politically tolerant" - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-counties-vary-their-degree-partisan-prejudice/583072/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-coun... , just due to the fact that living and interacting with people with more varied opinions may make people more in-tune with what members of the opposing political party actually believe. Would be cool to an analysis of the data to see if that correlation actually holds.

DubiousPusher 7y ago

Interesting piece. I would quibble with one part. At the end they imply that the contention in the country is reconcilable because the extremes do not represent the majority. Now the last time Americans had an irreconcilable difference was the Civil War. We do not have good statistics from that time but there is some evidence that the extreme positions (i.e. abolition vs. pan-American slavery) were not held by a majority of the people in the country. One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist. I guess my point is that just because the extremes are confused about how America feels, that doesn't mean they aren't driving us towards irreconcilable conflict. Now, I'm not one of those that thinks an intra-American conflict is forthcoming. But I would guess that if you modeled various internal conflicts throughout the history of nations, you wouldn't find many where roughly half the population stood solidly behind one idea and the half stood firmly behind another. I think in most you'd actually find something a lot like this. Two outlying groups driving the discourse against each other and a constituency of allies on each side that can't break away for various reasons.

linuxftw 7y ago
> One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist. Many assuredly weren't abolitionists, at least not as a matter of policy. The Corwin Amendment [1] was even passed by the 2/3 majority in the remaining senate and ratified by some northern states. Don't forget, Maryland was a slave state and fought on the side of the north. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment

harimau777 7y ago

Not directly what the article is talking about, but I feel like this is related: I recently spoke to a man who used to work for the Republican party. He felt that politics is so polarized because the two parties aren't even talking about the same things. The example he gave is that it's not possible for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on racial inequality, because the Republican party simply doesn't have that as part of their platform.

sudosteph 7y ago
Yeah, that's a particularly tough one because the most obvious laws about racial inequality (equal access to housing, jobs, education) were passed a while ago. Today if you want to address racial inequality via legislation, that means police reform and drug policy. When you talk about those subjects to someone who isn't either directly affected by them or well-educated about them, they don't seem on their face to be related to racial inequality. Only recently do you see republicans starting to talk (a little) about drug policy changes now that opioid abuse has started becoming a huge problem in some white communities. Video camera footage of police abuse may also help eventually bring republicans in on that problem - but that is dependent on cops having working cameras, not turning them off, and the people watching the video actually having empathy for the people being abused. Maybe if cops started harassing vocal 2nd amendment advocates their tune would change.

gremlinsinc 7y ago

The fact that they count Breitbart, and Redstate as 'news sources' skews the study a bit. Of course people who read that crap are going to have a larger perception gap. Even Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed skew more to the left. That's their reader-base, they are going to tailor pieces to keep the readers they have who lean progressive. I think they should've kept news sources to only nbc/cbs/cnn/cnbc/abc/hn as those are really the most conservative (not meaning GOP but 'reserved') news agencies that tend to (at least try to appear) non biased. Fox is definitely biased right, and MSNBC (which is what I watch) I agree skews left of center. I think if we brought back the Fairness doctrine that would help a lot but I don't know if we could enforce that on the internet or if we should. I'm a social democrat (not for full socialism, for social democracy like Denmark/France/Germany), but I can definitely see the perception gap for what it is, and it's causes. Our media system is broken. It's a propaganda machine that is controlled by multiple parties with no middle ground. A fairness doctrine would at least allow all sides of an issue to be represented and temper the propaganda machines. There are billionaires and Super PACS on both sides that are working to divide us. In fact there's some albeit conspiracy-sounding theories that the elite want us divided by fringe issues like abortion/gun control/immigration so we don't band together on worker rights, labor unions, healthcare, etc that would force them to funnel money at the bottom and switch from trickle down to trickle up economy. As long as we're hating each other and have these misperceptions and polarizations we're easy sheep to control.

erobbins 7y ago

I think this "study" is crap. On one side, you have armed terrorists threatening a state legislature, and on the other side you have... what? The gap isn't in perception, it's in civilized behavior.