Except that if their basis for deciding how Democrats/Republicans would answer a question is taken only from the pool of those who didn’t recoil from the question and refuse to answer it, and even within that pool includes people who chose at random because it was a bad question that they couldn’t answer properly: then they themselves have serious misperceptions about what either Democrats or Republicans think.
That’s certainly not how I read it. From the description, it sounds like they were trying to ask about ideas/positions the other side are likely to wrongly ascribe to the other. So I think the intent of the question is if anything the opposite of your interpretation: Republicans believe Democrats don’t care if men are wrongly accused, or don’t think it’s important.
I think it’s more hopeful than the alternative: that America is inhabited by two tribes of extremists holding incompatible views, with no hope of ever reconciling.
I didn’t get asked what others thought of that question; I didn’t get that far. I started off as a Democrat and got asked that question – what I thought of it, not what others did. It was one of the ones I refused to answer; but without answering all the questions I couldn’t go any further.
ETA: I didn’t get asked what I thought of it; I was asked to answer yes or no to it.
I gather I could get in as an independent without having to answer. But that doesn’t change my point, that they’re almost certainly getting misrepresentations of what Democrats (and probably Republicans) think; and therefore their own ideas of what Democrats and Republicans think are inaccurate, and they’re in no position to try to judge how accurate others’ perceptions are.
I think that the takeaway from this should be that those who take internet surveys are self selected to be more extreme than the bulk of the populace.
Possibly. I don’t find those questions hard to answer, though. Would you have just as much difficulty answering the ones aimed at Republicans?
They’re not getting the results from an internet survey, it says they had YouGov (a polling agency) carry out a normal survey to get the polling data. It still suffers from the dubious-interpretation-of-questions issue several people have pointed out, though.
I wish you’d post your results. I gather you live in a very Trump loving area, so it would be interesting to see if you have a better idea what Republicans believe.
I’m entirely unwilling to take a test based on crappy questions, and don’t think the results of a test based on crappy questions will let you see whether I’ve got a better idea of what Republicans believe.
ETA: I know a number of Repubicans, and IME they don’t all believe the same things.
Here are the questions they asked Republicans:
- Properly controlled immigration can be good for America
- Racism still exists in America
- Many Muslims are good Americans
- Sexism still exists in America
- The government should do more to stop guns getting into the hands of bad people
- Donald Trump is a flawed person
- People are right to be concerned about how climate change might affect us
What do you think? Equally crappy?
Yes, there is that. But I was talking about the second part of it, that of people guessing what the other side thought. Unless that was done by YouGov as well, and the internet survey the are offering isn’t part of it at all.
When it says, “On average, Democrats have a Perception Gap of 19%.”, is that based on the YouGov survey, or on their online test?
But yes, the questions are very misleading. I may think of properly controlled immigration as making sure that we aren’t taking in criminals and freeloaders, and someone else may think of properly controlled as making sure that they are white english speakers with a college degree. As mentioned, there may be those who think that racism exists in America due to things like affirmative action, or even that there are parts of town they don’t feel comfortable in. “Many” is an ambiguous word, It can mean anything from 5 individuals to 95% of the population. An MRA would certainly think that sexism exists in America.
The questions on the Democrat side seem even more leading. The question on men being protected from false accusations is pretty nasty, actually. What does that mean? Does that mean that the justice system takes an adversarial position against women who report sexual assault? (Or should I say, maintains that adversarial position). Do people need to be protected against false accusations of robbery or aggravated assault as well? “Completely open borders” is pretty loaded language. There are extremely few who don’t want any sort of check as to who is coming or going to our country, but removing immigration restrictions is often thought to be the same. What is a “socialist country”? We already are by some definitions, and we never will be by others. Bearing firearms is a nuanced subject. Should they have the right to bear them in Chili’s? Should they have to have a background check to ensure that they are law abiding, and should they make sure that anyone that they sell or give their gun to is also law abiding? Even what a “bad person” is, is ambiguous. Is a cop a bad person only if they violate the rights of the people they encounter, or are they a bad person if they see other cops act in this manner and don’t speak up? Are they bad cops if they don’t go to the effort of investigating the claims of their fellow officers?
In short, pretty much all of the questions are leading or ambiguous. This isn’t meant to perform some sort of useful metric or experiment. Like I said, I don’t know if they actually have a motive beyond creating clickbait, but their motive was not to create a robust and neutral analysis.
For what it’s worth, which IMO is pretty much zilch, I got a 6%
Everyone sees both sets of questions. It’s just that you answer the questions about how you feel before you answer the questions about how you think the other party feels.
And yes, those are pretty terrible questions.
All of this.
They’re not as bad as the ones they ask Democrats; which is interesting in itself.
But everything @k9bfriender said about the Republican questions I’ll second.
I assumed all that data was taken from the YouGov survey. Not sure what they are doing with the online data.
Re the questions, most of your interpretations wouldn’t even have occurred to me, or if they did, wouldn’t make much difference to my guesses. I doubt many of the interviewees were thinking about cops when asked about bad people, for example.
As for right to bear arms; yes, most Republicans support universal background checks according to recent survey:
You only see the second set if you answer the first set, which @thorny_locust has already said she refused to do.
I was expecting that answer. As a Democrat, the questions for Republicans are unlikely to be controversial to you. It’s a pity there are no Republicans available, I’d like to know if they see it the other way around.
Come on dude. David Duke insists with a straight face that he isn’t a racist. I’m 100% correct in judging him as a baldfaced racist. You know it, I know it, he knows it. We know it because he’s the former grand whatever of the KKK and continually advocates for race separation and other typical staples of racism.
If a quiz tells me that my perception of him as a racist is wrong, based on his farcical denial of his own racism, then I guess it’s technically correct, but does it tell you anything useful about my perceptivity? No. The only thing I misperceived is the quiz-maker’s choice to accept his deceptive framing about racism. Had they not decided to hide the ball, then I’d be right on the money about what the man believes and wants.
So yes, actually, the quality of the question does matter. It’s critically material in fact.