Why you should be suspicious of "people on the street were more ignorant of X than Y" stories

[mmcirvin]

I missed this in March: Mark Liberman of Language Log takes apart the "more people could name the Simpsons than First Amendment freedoms" story.

The people who could correctly name N First Amendment freedoms (I assume they didn't split freedom of religion into the establishment and free-exercise clauses) decreased monotonically with increasing N, whereas the Simpsons distribution was bimodal, with more people ignorant of even one Simpson than of one First Amendment freedom, but also a fairly large population who could name all of them. From these numbers it is possible to extract just about any message you want, especially if people repeating the story are inclined to garble the result in the desired direction.

Comments

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

Some other bozotic poll archetypes --

"Can you hunt a haggis?" If somebody asked you this, could you bring yourself to say no?

"Do you support eating roasted babies?" Five percent of poll respondents will say yes to anything. What can we do about America's estimated 15 million baby eaters?

Oh, and right now there's another "Fewer Americans than Europeans believe in evolution" poll making the rounds, which gets routinely distorted into "Most Americans don't believe in Evolution", even though the poll indicates the opposite. Yes, Europe, we know. American religious attitudes are usually somewhere between European attitudes and attitudes in, say, Mexico. (Part of the explanation is that there are a lot of Mexican and Hispanic immigrants in this country -- a small part, granted, but sufficient all by itself to explain some of the narrower gapes, such as between the most religiously conservative European countries and the United States.) I don't mind making fun of anybody for their silly beliefs, but let's be fair. The French have homeopathy. The UK has UFOs. South Koreans have ... heck, I don't remember, but it's weird. America's got astrology and creationism. Big diff. Countries with worse educational systems generally have more of the same, along with occasional really dangerous superstitions like AIDS witch-doctoring, Lysenkoism, or witch hunts, but superstitions that are very self-destructive tend not to become too prevalent for too long. (Then there's religious/ideological wars, but that's a different category.)

Not only is a weak science education a direct cause of greater superstition, but universal chauvinist tendencies (even if the bias is manifested as "We're internationalists, and that makes us better than you") tend to accentuate these differences. Patriotism only works in science's favor in countries that are good at it. It's facile and stupid to say that science is just another kind of prejudice, but prejudice can work in favor of a scientific viewpoint, and that's more likely to happen in Germany than the Congo. Unfortunately, chauvinism depends on relative and not absolute achievement, and not everyone can be at the top or, practically speaking, even believe that they are, so there will always be groups for whom the chauvinist impulse is anti-science.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

From what I remember the last time I looked into this, American polls about evolution/creationism get markedly different results depending on how you word the question, and markedly similar results from decade to decade. There sure are a lot of creationists in the US; biblical literalists are probably a large minority, but people who will say they're creationists if you phrase the question so that the alternative sounds like atheism are probably a majority.