Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Surveys (and Climate)

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Mark Twain

People are more likely to answer factual questions incorrectly if the facts do not conform to their political biases, even if presented with news stories disconfirming their preferred belief.  With money on the line, however, they will. The consequences for climate policy here are rather broad.

Wonkblog writes up the a reading of a recent paper by Larry Bartels at Princeton, who showed that Democrats were: 

Much less likely than Republicans to correctly answer questions about whether inflation went down under President Ronald Reagan (it did) and whether unemployment also fell (it did):

A second group of researchers found:

Republicans presented with news articles pointing out that there were no WMDs in Iraq were more likely to say that such weapons were found than Republicans who didn’t read those articles.

The implication here is that people with strong political beliefs are willing to register their political belief in a survey even at the expense of disconfirming an actual fact, which recalls the beautiful quote by Twain (which he claimed originated  in Benjamin Disraeli)

Yet when told that incorrect answers would be penalized by monetary fine, and by including the category "I Don't Know" as a response indicating a sort of "conscientious objection") the partisan gap (remember, this is the spread in answers on a fact  based on political affiliation) dropped by 80%.

The two main takeaways here? 

1. People will knowingly lie to support their political belief: people aren't as dumb as they appear
2. A monetary incentive is enough to eliminate the "bias of facts": people are as selfish as they appear

This calls into question reports on the acceptance of climate change in the United States: including the results from this Gallup poll. 

Gallup shows a major conservative bias towards a belief that climate change is exaggerated, and a liberal bias of similar magnitude (relative to the mean) towards a belief that it is not. Being that the "controversy" over climate change has become such a trenchant partisan issue, and that there is no magic information transmitted to Democrats that Republicans can't access, could it be that people are simply registering their political or religious belief into a survey, rather than their ignorance? 

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