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mnottertail -> RE: Tea Party and Science (10/17/2013 3:26:42 PM)
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Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.
he respondents consisted of a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. adults
Yeah, which is it, 2000 or a large nationally representative sample.
In my paper, Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection, I found that the Cogntive Reflection Test did not meaningfully correlate with left-right political outlooks.
In this dataset, I found that there is a small correlation (r = -0.05, p = 0.03) between the science comprehension measure and a left-right political outlook measure, Conservrepub, which aggregates liberal-conservative ideology and party self-identification. The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction--i.e., the more "liberal" and "Democrat," the more science comprehending.
But if you do, then maybe you'll find this interesting. The dataset happened to have an item in it that asked respondents if they considered themselves "part of the Tea Party movement." Nineteen percent said yes.
It turns out that there is about as strong a correlation between scores on the science comprehension scale and identifying with the Tea Party as there is between scores on the science comprehension scale and Conservrepub.
Except that it has the opposite sign: that is, identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively (r = 0.05, p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure:
Next time I collect data, too, I won't be surprised at all if the correlations between science comprehension and political ideology or identification with the Tea Party movement disappear or flip their signs. These effects are trivially small, & if I sample 2000+ people it's pretty likely any discrepancy I see will be "statistically significant"--which has precious little to do with "practically significant."
So, lets be clear what it does say and it dont say much, and not the nutsacker lies in the OP.
It says that left-leaners are more science aware, and that some identify as part of the tea party movement, not the nutsackers, not the teabaggers and not the 'conservatives' again, there is not one tea party member in congress, they are only and to a man and woman teabaggers.
So it says teabaggers are fucking imbeciles. That is all that is said.
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