Two seemingly unrelated stories flagged by memeorandum came together.
Axios (“Study: What Americans really think“):
“Self-silencing” — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel — is skewing our understanding of how Americans really feel about abortion, COVID-19 precautions, what children are taught in school and other hot-button issues, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The best predictor of private behavior is private opinion. People’s actual views are far more likely than their stated views to drive consumer and social behavior — and voting.
“When we’re misreading what we all think, it actually causes false polarization,” said Todd Rose, co-founder and president of Populace, the Massachusetts-based firm that undertook the study. “It actually destroys social trust. And it tends to historically make social progress all but impossible.”
The big picture: People are often more moderate than they’ll readily admit when “being pulled toward a vocal fringe,” whether left or right, Rose said.
But in some cases, he said, people reshape their privately held views to conform to what they think their group believes, even if that assessment is inaccurate.
The gap between real and stated views can have a generational impact, he said, because media amplifies perceptions that then cue young adults: “This generation’s illusions tend to become next generation’s private opinion.”
None of this is new, of course. We’ve long known that people tell pollsters things they don’t believe in order to conform to social expectations. The classic example is the Bradley/Wilder effect, wherein white folks tell pollsters they plan to vote for a Black candidate and then vote for the vote guy. It’s also why polling in authoritarian countries is likely unreliable.
Interestingly to me, most of the trends in this particular poll are going the other direction. Here’s the graphic:
In particular, I’d have bet heavily that the public/private gap went the other way in the two “schools” questions.
The methodology seems sound enough:
How it works: Respondents were provided a mix of traditional polling questions and other questions using a list experiment method, or item-count technique, that provides them with a greater sense of anonymity. This process allows researchers to find the gap between what people say versus how they privately feel.
As to the results:
By the numbers: On abortion, the study found men are much less likely to privately agree with the idea that the choice to have an abortion should be left solely to a woman and her doctor (45%) than would say so publicly (60%).
Republicans, meanwhile, were less likely to privately say Roe v. Wade should be overturned (51%) than publicly (64%).
(Remember: the survey was taken weeks ago.)
On COVID-19, only 44% of women privately feel wearing masks was effective at stopping COVID-19 spread, though 63% felt they should say they did.
Honestly, because we mostly wore bad masks poorly, I’m not sure the private opinion isn’t more right. But, if that’s an accurate representation of the question, it was worded poorly. Nothing was effective at stopping COVID-19 spread, after all, since it keeps spreading.
An astonishing four times as many Democrats say CEOs should take a public stand on social issues (44%) than actually care (11%).
Ironically, the public stand CEOs take on an issue are certainly calibrated to their intended audience, regardless of their own private opinion.
On education, Americans overall are privately more supportive of parents having more influence over curriculum (60%) than proclaim this publicly (52%).
That may help explain why GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s messaging on schools appealed to swing voters in Virginia last year, and why GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) championed “parents’ rights” in signing prohibitions on classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.
One in three Democrats think parents should have more influence over public school curriculum — even though only one in four say so publicly. Among independents, 71% agree privately agree, though only 55% say so when asked in a more direct polling format; 85% of Republicans privately feel that way.
Yes, but: Americans are actually less concerned about teachers talking about gender identity or how much public schools focus on racism than they say publicly.
Only about half of Americans actually think it is inappropriate for schools to discuss gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade, compared to the 63% who say so publicly.
This misconception is particularly stark among independents. Just 42% privately have an issue with discussions about gender identity in K-3rd, despite 67% saying they take an issue with it publicly.
Even though 63% of Republicans privately said they believed racism was too much of a focus in public schools — far more than Democrats or independents— the number is a lot lower than the 80% who felt compelled to say so publicly.
Honestly, this is just a complex issue. School boards are often elected yahoos who have no business making curricular decisions. Alas, our schoolteachers aren’t chosen from the ranks of elite philosophers, either. And parents, well, vary widely.
The intrigue: The study found the biggest disparities among Hispanic respondents and political independents. On 14 out of 25 topics, these groups had double-digit gaps between what they say and believe.
I’d need to know more to have any opinion on that whatsoever. Still, it’s interesting given that the report’s thesis is that the tension is between private opinion and those of one’s peer group. For independents, one would think that tension less than for Democrats or Republicans.
I had seen the Axios headline and opened a tab to read it later but read Jonathan V. Last‘s “The Anti-Anti-Trump Theory of Liz Cheney’s Loss” first. He highlights an idea that I’d seen noted in a couple of the reports on her primary loss yesterday morning: that Cheney lost, not because of her vehement rejection of the Big Lie that Democrats stole the election but because she’d stopped doing the work of representing Wyoming in Congress.
Just as an objective matter, this worldview is wrong. The voters of Wyoming rejected Liz Cheney purely because of her refusal to accept Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. That’s it. You can dress this up however you want and say that they see Cheney’s refusal to accept Trump’s lie as a betrayal of them rather than a betrayal of Trump. But that line doesn’t even rise to the level of semantic difference.
What’s more important here is the meta question:
Why would anyone feel the need to pretend that Wyoming Republicans didn’t reject Cheney because of Trump?
The answer is that for some percentage of Republicans/conservatives, they are intent on pretending that the Republican party / conservatism is something other than it is.
They insist that, (1) Whatever the party and its members are doing or saying right now, there is some True Conservatism or Real Republican Party also operating—either beneath the surface or off to the side. The unstated corollary is that (2) Eventually the unpleasant aspects of the current conservatism / Republicanism will prove transient and the world will return to the prior order.
After some opining (that I happen to agree with) on why this is wrong, he asks
So why are some people compelled to play make believe? Why can’t they accept the current reality for what it is?
Alas, the rest of the post is paywalled and I’m not interested enough in the Bulwark‘s content to pay more than I do for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal combined.
I’m not absolutely sure the two phenomena are related. It’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that huge numbers of Republicans, especially those who are a bit older and have adult memories that predate the rise of the Tea Party, actually believe things will snap back to normal.
Regardless, the larger idea that we hold different private and public opinions is interesting. Even more so in periods like the present with seemingly revolutionary changes in the zeitgeist upending longstanding cultural norms and beliefs.
