15 ms·

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

208 points by larsiusprime 4y ago

JennyFacts 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GiorgioG 4y ago
And they overestimate how badly the “other” political party is ruining the country when they’re in power.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  The economic effects of the policies shriek for themselves.
- asveikau 4y ago
  I don't know about that. Something like an executive order can have effects years after someone is gone, momentum builds and it takes effort for a successor to undo it. To say nothing about lifetime court appointments. Not just in the supreme court either.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Any examples? IIRC, many such orders signed by Trump were immediately undone or at the very least drastically watered down by Biden.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      The Patriot Act was an executive order
      - atdrummond 4y ago
        Are you sure? Because I distinctly remember only Senator Feingold voting against it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kube-system 4y ago
        The Patriot Act is law, enacted by the 107th United States Congress. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act You can tell because of the word “act” which refer to it being a formal legislative action.
        aliqot 4y ago
        https://www.state.gov/executive-order-13224/ https://www.state.gov/executive-order-13224/
        kube-system 4y ago
        What about it? EO 13224 is not the Patriot Act.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        The patriot act was passed by congress and signed by the president in 2001, and the last provisions expired in 2020.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
        No. >The Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66, the Act passed the Senate with a vote of 98–1.
    - godelski 4y ago
      Not an executive order, but what led to the 2009 financial crisis was mostly done under the Clinton administration. Honestly I think this is something us humans are really bad at (well we're known to be bad at this). Understanding causal effects through time. Not only are we bad at understanding causal facts but we're really bad at being forward thinking and understanding temporal phenomena. But I think the main point that the gp is making is that most of the things that happen under a president aren't really felt till well after they have left office. Many wins that presidents have are due to effects from former presidents. Like both Obama and Trump got praised for high S&P 500 values at the beginning of their presidencies. Obama came in after a big crash. There's also no way Trump could be a causal factor for growth in the first 3 months of his presidency. You can't really have that kind of effect that early on. Yes these presidents contributed to these markets, but it would be naive to say that the growth was because of them. Or we can look at the long lasting effects of Regan. Or even Civil Rights and Johnson. While there was more immediate consequences under both these presidents there were also very long term effects that we still see today.
      - btilly 4y ago
        I have no idea what you think happened under the Clinton era to cause the financial crash of 2009. Most of the immediate things, such as the housing boom driven by easy lending policies, happened under Bush. So I'd need a reference to support that idea. However I'll give you another one. Most people's impression is that Carter destroyed the economy and Reagan's deregulation saved the day. But actually the facts are almost exactly reversed - Carter did the deregulating but the benefits were not seen until Reagan was in power. See https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-about-carter https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-a... for a reference.
        winstonewert 4y ago
        The post you are responding to is probably referring to the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. According to some, that act (signed by Clinton) was (somewhat) responsible for the financial crash. But this is certainly a matter of dispute.
    - dillondoyle 4y ago
      Took a while to end 'stay in Mexico' had to go through courts iirc. Seems like a lot of the drilling and EPA stuff has been gummed up in courts too Interesting article link below talking about Biden's push and the problem with R partisan judges. and the potential that if an order goes too far, court is given opportunity to make a broad and lasting ruling that would limit powers. I can very easily see this happening. https://time.com/6205771/trump-judges-biden-executive-orders-abortion/ https://time.com/6205771/trump-judges-biden-executive-orders...
      - asveikau 4y ago
        This is one prime example I was thinking of when I wrote the comment, but I was waiting for someone else to say it. I have vague memories of other things, like maybe some Bush orders that didn't get a swift or easy rollback with Obama ... But that was longer ago. But I think more broadly and nonpartisan, a law passed by Congress or an executive order by the president that is done when someone feels they have a mandate... Often sets broad policy for years and outlasts the mandate. More than most people understand. I think this contradicts the easy, oversimplified statement people like to make that elections don't matter and the parties and candidates are interchangable.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    All federal judges are lifetime. https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-judges https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-jud... https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-about-aileen-m-cannon-the-judge-who-granted-trump-a-special-master/ https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-a...
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      From https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-government/the-judicial-branch/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm... Federal judges can only be removed through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate. Judges and Justices serve no fixed term — they serve until their death, retirement, or conviction by the Senate. So retirement is an option, which is what I am guessing most choose.
    - asveikau 4y ago
      That's what I was pointing out, friend. HN is one of those internet communities where people reply with what I read as an aggressive tone, but they agree with me, and it's as if they are angrily correcting me but they didn't realize I was saying their same thing. Is that just my perception?
      - latchkey 4y ago
        I wasn't being aggressive, I was filing in the blanks for others that might be interested. Your comment encouraged me do the research myself (I didn't remember who else was lifetime from my high school classes in the late 80's) and I figured I'd share that, as well as, give another link that explains a bit more context to what I felt you left out.
        asveikau 4y ago
        Ok, thank you. The internet is funny. Neutral tones can come across as aggressive. Aggression, generally, though, can totally be all in the head of the perceiver.
- nichos 4y ago
  Is there a difference in the 2 major parties anymore? I seriously don't know which parry you're referring to.
  - Karellen 4y ago
    The only people I ever see asking that are right-wing pundits trying to convince left-leaning voters not to bother voting, and occasionally burned-out centrists who've fallen for it. I've never seen a serious left-wing voter/activist/politician come out with the claim that "well, the right are just as bad as we are". "We are not so different, you and I" is always the last-ditch claim of the villain, knowing that they have no moral ground to stand on, trying to drag down the people who are trying to do better for not being perfect. And it's bullshit. Always has been, always will be.
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    - dnissley 4y ago
      I've noticed there is a tendency among folks on the left (and for all I know it's also true of folks on the right) where people who do as you say are cast out and labeled "centrists", creating a dynamic where internal criticism is silenced. I speak as someone who self-identified as on the left for many years, but no longer feels comfortable doing so because of how incurious and closed off to criticism the left has become.
      - plorkyeran 4y ago
        "Internal criticism is silenced" is an... interesting view of the left. A more common view is that endless leftist infighting is one of the things that makes leftists ineffectual.
        ars 4y ago
        Those are not contradictory. Without the ability to criticize others, different groups can each claim to be "the left", and they don't have the ability to work through their differences to unify.
- WheatM 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
randomdata 4y ago
> Belief in God has decreased only 10% over the past 60 years (3). The linked poll shows a 17% decline?
- Animats 4y ago
  The Gallup religion poll is self-reported.[1] But some of the questions asked are objective, such as "How often do you attend church or synagogue -- every week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never?" Self-reported church attendance in the US is about twice what churches report actually show up. (That info used to be on adherents.org, but the site is gone.) Questions along those lines are tough to get answered well. Who asks makes a big difference. Phone surveys on drinking get quite different results if the people calling are drinkers or non-drinkers. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx
  - randomdata 4y ago
    It was a mathematical error in this case. Whether or not the poll itself is meaningful is inconsequential.
  - tremon 4y ago
    I got asked to participate in a Gallup poll once. On numerous questions, my answer wasn't part of the "permitted" answers so they had to enter something only mildly related to my real opinion (and the interviewer kept badgering me to select one of the permitted answers, which was amusing). These polls are unreliable from the outset, bad poll design defeats their accuracy even with well-meaning respondents. So nowadays, I just decline to participate.
saurik 4y ago
Do you need some kind of account to see this link? When I click it I get redirected to the home page with the same anchor but ?skip=true :(. https://www.pnas.org/?skip=true#abstract https://www.pnas.org/?skip=true#abstract
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  Works for me? Here's the DOI in any case: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107260119
- godelski 4y ago
  I have the link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 If you're unable to see it maybe we can figure out some means to share.
godelski 4y ago
The actual title is > Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change Not "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." And from the abstract > Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). (out of 51 different attitudes) Maybe we can change the title. When I read this abstract I got the feeling that Americans just don't know what's going on. Which honestly makes far more sense. Things are changing rapidly recently. It especially makes sense when you consider we're isolating our social groups more (internet makes this easier but isn't a sole contributor) and so there would be a biased estimate for over estimation. What's also really interesting is that going through some of these is that it seems that people in the 70's greatly underestimated many things. For example when asked about abortion with there was serious risk people estimated (in 72) that only 49% of people were in favor but actually 87% were in favor. Now perception has changed to 71 and actual to 90. Another example is concerns about climate change. In 1990 people estimated 28% were concerned but actually 61% were concerned. Now it is 65.5 vs 65. If you just came here for the title it really does look like there is a lot more interesting data than what the title says. It does seem like some things we've gotten better at getting estimates on while others are more difficult. Worth at least looking at the figures. But definitely could be some interesting followup analysis.
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  Sorry, I based the submission title from a press repost, but wanted to link the original source, which apparently had a different title.
  - phantom_of_cato 4y ago
    That shouldn't be permitted, otherwise everything can be submitted with any arbitrary title: you just submit the original with the title you used to link to it in your personal blog.
    - larsiusprime 4y ago
alexfromapex 4y ago
[deleted]
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  The authors are using this an example of a widespread thing people think is true (that belief in god has gone from ubiquitous to uncommon), but that is not actually true (belief in god has decreased, but not by as much as people think), the subject of what the article measures.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    The referenced GALLOP poll only asked if the respondents believe in God/believe in a God. Pew Research conducted a similar study and found that 90% of respondents believe in a higher power, which echos GALLOP, but only 56% believe in God as described in the Bible. It's not clear what percentage of people believed in the Bible's God 60 years ago, but if we, for argument's sake, assume 90-100% then 56% support now is comparatively uncommon. Under those assumptions, it would be quite reasonable to think that religious culture has changed dramatically. The key takeaway here is that communication is hard and that data is easy to twist.
axiolite 4y ago
"All Generalizations Are False."
unwise-exe 4y ago
> Significance > People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people’s efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. People can't follow the herd if they don't know where the herd is going.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lkrubner 4y ago
It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée "The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns." We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for this perspective.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Chronically misunderstood, early Michel Foucault goes one step forward than this and asks "Why not just remove the human as catalyst of truth entirely? What if humans are just the canvas for knowledges rather than the other way around?" Another way to look at his hypothesis: what if truth and knowledge are no differently anonymous automata than the processes of biological evolution with respect to individuals?
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    The ancient greeks did not have this relationship to (written) knowledge. Greeks had to have a human vouch for the validity of the written document. Tying truth to written history is noble but also flawed.
lettergram 4y ago
I think this is a product of mass social media and mass media. Effectively, we amplify propaganda one way or another. It leads to false impressions and we are unable to make decisions based off real information. This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education. Easy example, we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. Yet our perception is skewed because of what we see in the news / shared. Truly, most of our understanding is skewed in such a manner. That’s why ignoring anecdotal stories is so important for rational policy discussion. Unfortunately, mass media & social media (imo) is really making it impossible.
- bruce511 4y ago
  Our ability to understand risk is imperfect, and certaintainly divorced from actual risk numbers. While perceptions based on media are surely a factor, its also based on our control over the risk. Lots of people die in car accidents (presumably because they are bad drivers) but I am a good driver, therefore the risk for me is much lower or zero. I am in control therefore my perception of risk is reduced. What risk there is, I accept in return for the utility of a car. Same for drugs - my kids are well brought up, and I'm a good parent, so the risk of an overdose is low, and I feel in control of that. Clearly lots of people balance the risk of an overdose against the utility of taking the drugs (and clearly they get it wrong a lot.) School shootings have no (direct) utility. So I am both lacking in control, and there is no utility balance, I am concerned about this a lot more. I see the solution as fewer guns, but that crosses over with the utility perceived by a large segment of society. Since they are unwilling to give up that utility we reach an impass. School shootings are a side effect of gun ownership, which has a significant perceived utility to a large group of people. Those people implicitly accept that some people (including children) die in the service of that utility. To them taking away guns is as ridiculous as taking away cars (which also kill people.) taking away cars is absurd right? Of course perceived utility may not be real. Lots of people in the world live without guns. Lots live without cars. But these perceptions are hard, dare I say impossible, to change.
jschveibinz 4y ago
Not to suggest culture=politics, but if you haven’t watched the Buckley-Vidal “debates” from the ‘68 election, you are missing out on some interesting history of the fight between American liberalism/socialism and libertarianism/conservatism.
JennyFacts 4y ago
evouga 4y ago
It’s interesting to see the plots of true change in opinions. There has been massive change in favor of gay rights, gender equality, marijuana legalization, and interracial marriage. On pretty much every other topic, change is negligible.
nitwit005 4y ago
This seems to assume people are being honest on these polls, but we know they are not: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/upshot/americans-claim-to-attend-church-much-more-than-they-do.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/upshot/americans-claim-to... It's better to find a behavioral measure, like actual election results, to look at if at all possible.
somenameforme 4y ago
There is a severe demographic problem with this study (among others). A current trend in the social sciences is using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific to run surveys. These sites are based around paying people pennies to compete menial tasks (like complete surveys), and populated with large numbers of "professional" menial task executers. This study offered the big bucks of $1.50 - $2.25. There are two major problems with this: 1) It doesn't matter how you normalize a sample when that sample is a niche subsample of society to begin with. This has always been a problem with the social sciences which previously relied heavily on undergraduates in social science classes, but that is going to at least be much closer to something like a representative sample than Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific can offer. 2) The people carrying out the tasks are motivated primarily by blazing through as many studies as possible while doing the bare minimum to get paid, and many fail at even that. In this study ctrl+f for "attention check." To this study's credit, they at least included numerous attention checks, but it emphasizes the issue. On average about 1 out of 6 participants were excluded for failing to correctly answer questions along the lines of "Please select C as the answer to this question." Journals are likely indulging this because it's going to generate endless "impact" (which is increasingly becoming a euphemism for clickbait), but it's undermining the entire field more than ever before.
- manimino 4y ago
  Why would undergraduates be more representative of society than Mechanical Turk users? Surely the Turk users span a much wider range of age and geolocation.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  It always amazes me how such studies are simply left up to the academics, because clearly taking representative samples of the population will need some kind of help from the government to organise it
  - incone123 4y ago
    Probably just requires a bigger budget than most academics have. I got paid £50 to spend half an hour giving feedback on a new website, in a 1:1 conversation with a researcher. Granted the funding was from government, but Kantar did the organisation side.
noobermin 4y ago
May be I'm just wrong, but the plots do show some changes, but I don't know how much we can fault people for not knowing exact percentages. A lay person estimating 40% is close enough to 50% for me.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
When I read it correctly, then one should correct these misperceptions in long-term attitude change when the resulting political mindset runs counter to one's own... The fact stated at the beginning, that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening since it can so easily be exploited by mass media and algorithms.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening We've known that for forever though. Advertising exploits that fact to great effect. A lot of people either go with the crowd or have viable alternatives crowded/drowned out by what's popular for being popular. It makes media consolidation a huge concern. It's also why the entertainment industry is so desperate to fight piracy. It's less about the sales figures than it is about the power to act as a gatekeeper that shapes our culture and dictates how/when we get access to it.
rayiner 4y ago
I have a theory that people also misjudge the root causes of change, which causes them to overestimate foundational shifts in attitude. Changes in attitudes can reflect technological or economic changes, without changes in moral philosophy. For example, a society based around knowledge work is inherently going to have different attitudes to women working than one based around manual labor in heavy industry, without necessarily any deeper differences in social philosophy. Similarly, I suspect the rapid increasing in acceptance of same sex marriage, from 27% in 1997 to over 70% today, has mostly to do dissemination of scientific knowledge than deeper changes in attitudes.
vannevar 4y ago
Just looking at the charts, I'm surprised by how accurately the trends were identified by the public. What the authors call "misperceptions" are in many cases just systematic errors in the absolute numbers, which frankly I would expect. The vast majority of the trend slopes are quite close to actual. I feel like the authors are reaching a bit for a controversial conclusion.

208 points by larsiusprime 4y ago

JennyFacts 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GiorgioG 4y ago

And they overestimate how badly the “other” political party is ruining the country when they’re in power.

smitty1e 4y ago
The economic effects of the policies shriek for themselves.
asveikau 4y ago
I don't know about that. Something like an executive order can have effects years after someone is gone, momentum builds and it takes effort for a successor to undo it. To say nothing about lifetime court appointments. Not just in the supreme court either.
- dnissley 4y ago
  Any examples? IIRC, many such orders signed by Trump were immediately undone or at the very least drastically watered down by Biden.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    The Patriot Act was an executive order
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      Are you sure? Because I distinctly remember only Senator Feingold voting against it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - kube-system 4y ago
      The Patriot Act is law, enacted by the 107th United States Congress. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act You can tell because of the word “act” which refer to it being a formal legislative action.
      - aliqot 4y ago
        https://www.state.gov/executive-order-13224/ https://www.state.gov/executive-order-13224/
        kube-system 4y ago
        What about it? EO 13224 is not the Patriot Act.
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      The patriot act was passed by congress and signed by the president in 2001, and the last provisions expired in 2020.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
      No. >The Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66, the Act passed the Senate with a vote of 98–1.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Not an executive order, but what led to the 2009 financial crisis was mostly done under the Clinton administration. Honestly I think this is something us humans are really bad at (well we're known to be bad at this). Understanding causal effects through time. Not only are we bad at understanding causal facts but we're really bad at being forward thinking and understanding temporal phenomena. But I think the main point that the gp is making is that most of the things that happen under a president aren't really felt till well after they have left office. Many wins that presidents have are due to effects from former presidents. Like both Obama and Trump got praised for high S&P 500 values at the beginning of their presidencies. Obama came in after a big crash. There's also no way Trump could be a causal factor for growth in the first 3 months of his presidency. You can't really have that kind of effect that early on. Yes these presidents contributed to these markets, but it would be naive to say that the growth was because of them. Or we can look at the long lasting effects of Regan. Or even Civil Rights and Johnson. While there was more immediate consequences under both these presidents there were also very long term effects that we still see today.
    - btilly 4y ago
      I have no idea what you think happened under the Clinton era to cause the financial crash of 2009. Most of the immediate things, such as the housing boom driven by easy lending policies, happened under Bush. So I'd need a reference to support that idea. However I'll give you another one. Most people's impression is that Carter destroyed the economy and Reagan's deregulation saved the day. But actually the facts are almost exactly reversed - Carter did the deregulating but the benefits were not seen until Reagan was in power. See https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-about-carter https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-a... for a reference.
      - winstonewert 4y ago
        The post you are responding to is probably referring to the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. According to some, that act (signed by Clinton) was (somewhat) responsible for the financial crash. But this is certainly a matter of dispute.
  - dillondoyle 4y ago
    Took a while to end 'stay in Mexico' had to go through courts iirc. Seems like a lot of the drilling and EPA stuff has been gummed up in courts too Interesting article link below talking about Biden's push and the problem with R partisan judges. and the potential that if an order goes too far, court is given opportunity to make a broad and lasting ruling that would limit powers. I can very easily see this happening. https://time.com/6205771/trump-judges-biden-executive-orders-abortion/ https://time.com/6205771/trump-judges-biden-executive-orders...
    - asveikau 4y ago
      This is one prime example I was thinking of when I wrote the comment, but I was waiting for someone else to say it. I have vague memories of other things, like maybe some Bush orders that didn't get a swift or easy rollback with Obama ... But that was longer ago. But I think more broadly and nonpartisan, a law passed by Congress or an executive order by the president that is done when someone feels they have a mandate... Often sets broad policy for years and outlasts the mandate. More than most people understand. I think this contradicts the easy, oversimplified statement people like to make that elections don't matter and the parties and candidates are interchangable.
- latchkey 4y ago
  All federal judges are lifetime. https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-judges https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-jud... https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-about-aileen-m-cannon-the-judge-who-granted-trump-a-special-master/ https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-a...
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    From https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-government/the-judicial-branch/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm... Federal judges can only be removed through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate. Judges and Justices serve no fixed term — they serve until their death, retirement, or conviction by the Senate. So retirement is an option, which is what I am guessing most choose.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    That's what I was pointing out, friend. HN is one of those internet communities where people reply with what I read as an aggressive tone, but they agree with me, and it's as if they are angrily correcting me but they didn't realize I was saying their same thing. Is that just my perception?
    - latchkey 4y ago
      I wasn't being aggressive, I was filing in the blanks for others that might be interested. Your comment encouraged me do the research myself (I didn't remember who else was lifetime from my high school classes in the late 80's) and I figured I'd share that, as well as, give another link that explains a bit more context to what I felt you left out.
      - asveikau 4y ago
        Ok, thank you. The internet is funny. Neutral tones can come across as aggressive. Aggression, generally, though, can totally be all in the head of the perceiver.
nichos 4y ago
Is there a difference in the 2 major parties anymore? I seriously don't know which parry you're referring to.
- Karellen 4y ago
  The only people I ever see asking that are right-wing pundits trying to convince left-leaning voters not to bother voting, and occasionally burned-out centrists who've fallen for it. I've never seen a serious left-wing voter/activist/politician come out with the claim that "well, the right are just as bad as we are". "We are not so different, you and I" is always the last-ditch claim of the villain, knowing that they have no moral ground to stand on, trying to drag down the people who are trying to do better for not being perfect. And it's bullshit. Always has been, always will be.
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  - dnissley 4y ago
    I've noticed there is a tendency among folks on the left (and for all I know it's also true of folks on the right) where people who do as you say are cast out and labeled "centrists", creating a dynamic where internal criticism is silenced. I speak as someone who self-identified as on the left for many years, but no longer feels comfortable doing so because of how incurious and closed off to criticism the left has become.
    - plorkyeran 4y ago
      "Internal criticism is silenced" is an... interesting view of the left. A more common view is that endless leftist infighting is one of the things that makes leftists ineffectual.
      - ars 4y ago
        Those are not contradictory. Without the ability to criticize others, different groups can each claim to be "the left", and they don't have the ability to work through their differences to unify.
WheatM 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

randomdata 4y ago

> Belief in God has decreased only 10% over the past 60 years (3). The linked poll shows a 17% decline?

Animats 4y ago
The Gallup religion poll is self-reported.[1] But some of the questions asked are objective, such as "How often do you attend church or synagogue -- every week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never?" Self-reported church attendance in the US is about twice what churches report actually show up. (That info used to be on adherents.org, but the site is gone.) Questions along those lines are tough to get answered well. Who asks makes a big difference. Phone surveys on drinking get quite different results if the people calling are drinkers or non-drinkers. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx
- randomdata 4y ago
  It was a mathematical error in this case. Whether or not the poll itself is meaningful is inconsequential.
- tremon 4y ago
  I got asked to participate in a Gallup poll once. On numerous questions, my answer wasn't part of the "permitted" answers so they had to enter something only mildly related to my real opinion (and the interviewer kept badgering me to select one of the permitted answers, which was amusing). These polls are unreliable from the outset, bad poll design defeats their accuracy even with well-meaning respondents. So nowadays, I just decline to participate.

saurik 4y ago

Do you need some kind of account to see this link? When I click it I get redirected to the home page with the same anchor but ?skip=true :(. https://www.pnas.org/?skip=true#abstract https://www.pnas.org/?skip=true#abstract

larsiusprime 4y ago
Works for me? Here's the DOI in any case: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107260119
godelski 4y ago
I have the link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 If you're unable to see it maybe we can figure out some means to share.

godelski 4y ago

The actual title is > Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change Not "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." And from the abstract > Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). (out of 51 different attitudes) Maybe we can change the title. When I read this abstract I got the feeling that Americans just don't know what's going on. Which honestly makes far more sense. Things are changing rapidly recently. It especially makes sense when you consider we're isolating our social groups more (internet makes this easier but isn't a sole contributor) and so there would be a biased estimate for over estimation. What's also really interesting is that going through some of these is that it seems that people in the 70's greatly underestimated many things. For example when asked about abortion with there was serious risk people estimated (in 72) that only 49% of people were in favor but actually 87% were in favor. Now perception has changed to 71 and actual to 90. Another example is concerns about climate change. In 1990 people estimated 28% were concerned but actually 61% were concerned. Now it is 65.5 vs 65. If you just came here for the title it really does look like there is a lot more interesting data than what the title says. It does seem like some things we've gotten better at getting estimates on while others are more difficult. Worth at least looking at the figures. But definitely could be some interesting followup analysis.

larsiusprime 4y ago
Sorry, I based the submission title from a press repost, but wanted to link the original source, which apparently had a different title.
- phantom_of_cato 4y ago
  That shouldn't be permitted, otherwise everything can be submitted with any arbitrary title: you just submit the original with the title you used to link to it in your personal blog.
  - larsiusprime 4y ago

alexfromapex 4y ago

[deleted]

larsiusprime 4y ago
The authors are using this an example of a widespread thing people think is true (that belief in god has gone from ubiquitous to uncommon), but that is not actually true (belief in god has decreased, but not by as much as people think), the subject of what the article measures.
- randomdata 4y ago
  The referenced GALLOP poll only asked if the respondents believe in God/believe in a God. Pew Research conducted a similar study and found that 90% of respondents believe in a higher power, which echos GALLOP, but only 56% believe in God as described in the Bible. It's not clear what percentage of people believed in the Bible's God 60 years ago, but if we, for argument's sake, assume 90-100% then 56% support now is comparatively uncommon. Under those assumptions, it would be quite reasonable to think that religious culture has changed dramatically. The key takeaway here is that communication is hard and that data is easy to twist.

axiolite 4y ago

"All Generalizations Are False."

unwise-exe 4y ago

> Significance > People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people’s efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. People can't follow the herd if they don't know where the herd is going.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lkrubner 4y ago

It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée "The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns." We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).

jschveibinz 4y ago
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective.
imbnwa 4y ago
Chronically misunderstood, early Michel Foucault goes one step forward than this and asks "Why not just remove the human as catalyst of truth entirely? What if humans are just the canvas for knowledges rather than the other way around?" Another way to look at his hypothesis: what if truth and knowledge are no differently anonymous automata than the processes of biological evolution with respect to individuals?
- barrysteve 4y ago
  The ancient greeks did not have this relationship to (written) knowledge. Greeks had to have a human vouch for the validity of the written document. Tying truth to written history is noble but also flawed.

lettergram 4y ago

I think this is a product of mass social media and mass media. Effectively, we amplify propaganda one way or another. It leads to false impressions and we are unable to make decisions based off real information. This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education. Easy example, we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. Yet our perception is skewed because of what we see in the news / shared. Truly, most of our understanding is skewed in such a manner. That’s why ignoring anecdotal stories is so important for rational policy discussion. Unfortunately, mass media & social media (imo) is really making it impossible.

bruce511 4y ago
Our ability to understand risk is imperfect, and certaintainly divorced from actual risk numbers. While perceptions based on media are surely a factor, its also based on our control over the risk. Lots of people die in car accidents (presumably because they are bad drivers) but I am a good driver, therefore the risk for me is much lower or zero. I am in control therefore my perception of risk is reduced. What risk there is, I accept in return for the utility of a car. Same for drugs - my kids are well brought up, and I'm a good parent, so the risk of an overdose is low, and I feel in control of that. Clearly lots of people balance the risk of an overdose against the utility of taking the drugs (and clearly they get it wrong a lot.) School shootings have no (direct) utility. So I am both lacking in control, and there is no utility balance, I am concerned about this a lot more. I see the solution as fewer guns, but that crosses over with the utility perceived by a large segment of society. Since they are unwilling to give up that utility we reach an impass. School shootings are a side effect of gun ownership, which has a significant perceived utility to a large group of people. Those people implicitly accept that some people (including children) die in the service of that utility. To them taking away guns is as ridiculous as taking away cars (which also kill people.) taking away cars is absurd right? Of course perceived utility may not be real. Lots of people in the world live without guns. Lots live without cars. But these perceptions are hard, dare I say impossible, to change.

jschveibinz 4y ago

Not to suggest culture=politics, but if you haven’t watched the Buckley-Vidal “debates” from the ‘68 election, you are missing out on some interesting history of the fight between American liberalism/socialism and libertarianism/conservatism.

JennyFacts 4y ago

evouga 4y ago

It’s interesting to see the plots of true change in opinions. There has been massive change in favor of gay rights, gender equality, marijuana legalization, and interracial marriage. On pretty much every other topic, change is negligible.

nitwit005 4y ago

This seems to assume people are being honest on these polls, but we know they are not: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/upshot/americans-claim-to-attend-church-much-more-than-they-do.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/upshot/americans-claim-to... It's better to find a behavioral measure, like actual election results, to look at if at all possible.

somenameforme 4y ago

There is a severe demographic problem with this study (among others). A current trend in the social sciences is using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific to run surveys. These sites are based around paying people pennies to compete menial tasks (like complete surveys), and populated with large numbers of "professional" menial task executers. This study offered the big bucks of $1.50 - $2.25. There are two major problems with this: 1) It doesn't matter how you normalize a sample when that sample is a niche subsample of society to begin with. This has always been a problem with the social sciences which previously relied heavily on undergraduates in social science classes, but that is going to at least be much closer to something like a representative sample than Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific can offer. 2) The people carrying out the tasks are motivated primarily by blazing through as many studies as possible while doing the bare minimum to get paid, and many fail at even that. In this study ctrl+f for "attention check." To this study's credit, they at least included numerous attention checks, but it emphasizes the issue. On average about 1 out of 6 participants were excluded for failing to correctly answer questions along the lines of "Please select C as the answer to this question." Journals are likely indulging this because it's going to generate endless "impact" (which is increasingly becoming a euphemism for clickbait), but it's undermining the entire field more than ever before.

manimino 4y ago
Why would undergraduates be more representative of society than Mechanical Turk users? Surely the Turk users span a much wider range of age and geolocation.
bowsamic 4y ago
It always amazes me how such studies are simply left up to the academics, because clearly taking representative samples of the population will need some kind of help from the government to organise it
- incone123 4y ago
  Probably just requires a bigger budget than most academics have. I got paid £50 to spend half an hour giving feedback on a new website, in a 1:1 conversation with a researcher. Granted the funding was from government, but Kantar did the organisation side.

noobermin 4y ago

May be I'm just wrong, but the plots do show some changes, but I don't know how much we can fault people for not knowing exact percentages. A lay person estimating 40% is close enough to 50% for me.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

When I read it correctly, then one should correct these misperceptions in long-term attitude change when the resulting political mindset runs counter to one's own... The fact stated at the beginning, that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening since it can so easily be exploited by mass media and algorithms.

autoexec 4y ago
> that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening We've known that for forever though. Advertising exploits that fact to great effect. A lot of people either go with the crowd or have viable alternatives crowded/drowned out by what's popular for being popular. It makes media consolidation a huge concern. It's also why the entertainment industry is so desperate to fight piracy. It's less about the sales figures than it is about the power to act as a gatekeeper that shapes our culture and dictates how/when we get access to it.

rayiner 4y ago

I have a theory that people also misjudge the root causes of change, which causes them to overestimate foundational shifts in attitude. Changes in attitudes can reflect technological or economic changes, without changes in moral philosophy. For example, a society based around knowledge work is inherently going to have different attitudes to women working than one based around manual labor in heavy industry, without necessarily any deeper differences in social philosophy. Similarly, I suspect the rapid increasing in acceptance of same sex marriage, from 27% in 1997 to over 70% today, has mostly to do dissemination of scientific knowledge than deeper changes in attitudes.

vannevar 4y ago

Just looking at the charts, I'm surprised by how accurately the trends were identified by the public. What the authors call "misperceptions" are in many cases just systematic errors in the absolute numbers, which frankly I would expect. The vast majority of the trend slopes are quite close to actual. I feel like the authors are reaching a bit for a controversial conclusion.