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Political Ideology Shapes How People Perceive Temperature
benfrog writes "In what likely isn't that much of a surprise, a study has shown that political ideology shapes how we perceive temperature changes (but not drought/flooding conditions). (An abstract of the study is here. 8,000 individuals were asked about temperatures and drought/flood events in recent years, then their political leanings. Answers regarding drought/flood events tended to follow the actual changes in conditions, while answers regarding temperature tended to follow people's political beliefs."
...when looked at by political groupings, did any particular political grouping's perceptions of the temperate correlate more closely to reality than the others?
i.e. was there one or more political ideologies that was more divorced from reality than the others, by any meaningful statistical deviation? Or were they all off, just in different directions based on political ideology?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
while answers regarding temperature tended to follow people's political beliefs.
It's been wicked hot lately, so I'm thinking of becoming a Republican and denouncing global-warming to cool things off. :-)
You can thank me later. Note: I also want a fancy pony - like Mitt.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Individuals who followed George W. Bush all thought the temperature was "awesome".
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I really really really really despise articles that are subjective analysis of data that don't include any sort of access to the data itself. "Trust us the numbers say X" is the single most intolerable statement to a rational human being.
Basic cognitive dissonance modelling has demonstrated repeatedly that when a person encounters incontrovertible facts that contradict deeply held beliefs, the facts are discarded.
I am officially gone from
except when taxes come due, then I feel a lot of cold water on my plans.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
I think the REAL correlation is people who were polled tended to BELIEVE the stance of the political party they ascribe on climate but having not been swayed by their party on drought/flooding one way or the other simply answered according to their observations.
or not..
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I cannot access TFJA, just websites talking about it. What was the significance level of their results? I mean, I've seen articles with very low significance and high p values (that the article says that there is no evidence what they measured exist) but the press still passed it around like it blew open entire fields.
...made by some Dutch professor in Social Sciences right ? Lately 2 professors turned out to be frauds, exactly in this area, and this article could be another: unfunded conclusions by a vague questionnaire... :)
Not saying that it is of course, but erm... just saying
Look at a political map of the US, and what's the first thing that pops out at you? A lot more conservatives live in the southern US. Most of the places where conservatives tend to live are warm, while liberals tend to live in cooler areas. People in areas that are normally cooler would be more likely to notice an increase in temperature than people in areas that are generally warmer. Personally, I'm used to 80%+ humidity and upper 90s-low 100s myself, so this summer has actually seemed pretty mild in comparison to what I'm used to. But that has nothing to do with whether or not I believe in global warming. It has more to do with the kind of weather I am acclimated to.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
...of cold and we move to Florida.
It seems the other way for me. I'm a rather left-leaning type and I say it's 33 right now, but the conservative in the next cube over keeps saying it's 97.
Maybe its easier to member things like the house being under water, or there not being rain in 50 something days in an location that averages rainfall multiple times per week is just easier to remember than on average it is 1 degree warmer each day this month than last year or the year before when there is a 15 degree swing on the highs during the month. So when it comes to temperature people fall back on their political beliefs in the accuracy of temperature records, etc.
It's kind of hard to miss a flood when you live in your parents' basement. It gets damp and the sump pump wakes you up at night. But temperature? I'd have to actually go outside to know what it is. Otherwise, all I have to go on is my belief in global warming.
Non-sequitur, but what the hell.
Funny how you see that as unnecessary big government forcing into people's lives rather than a limiting of the disgraceful ways those same people have been treated by profit-mongering companies for decades.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
So can I save on air conditioning, by having a cold political ideology in the summer?
And save on heating costs, by having hot political ideology in the winter?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Conservatives don't believe in climate change. News at eleven.
Or equivalently, Liberals exagerate the effect of climate change. That study seems to indicate that there was no actual predictive power by people in regards to temperature (liberal or conservative), go figure. People that don't specialize in studying temperature, don't know what the trend is. That's news?
<rant>Personally, I find people that resort to using fallacies (like a fallacy of composition) in arguments really just shows how much of a disservice much of the activisim has been to the whole climate debate. Does anyone really expect someone who might be swayed about evidence of climate change, to say: I must change all my principles to be Liberal if I change my position on this subject or it doesn't count? No. There are only 2 reasons people say CRAP like this. Either they have an alternate political agenda, or it's because they are unable to process information and need green and magenta labels to put on people to help them make sure they are not accidentally getting the wrong message. You aren't helping the cause of trying to get something done about the climate...</rant>
People with a vested interest in the sky falling, notice something that could at the wildest extrapolation mean the sky is falling.
People without such interest, disregard such signs.
Or it could be that some are pantywaists that get in a twist over trivia, and some aren't.
-Styopa
Global warming alarmists are the ones who decided to politicize the issue.
Thanks for nothing, guys.
Correlation is not causation...
Gee. I think a bit of warming would be a good thing. But it has nothing to do with politics. I simply live in the cold north lands. Warming would open up more of our season to being able to grow things. City folk and southern folk don't understand this aspect. Not surprisingly, most liberals come from urban areas.
I'm pro-Global Warming. Think about it. The greatest biodiversity has been during periods of warming. The greatest die offs, not caused by things like astroids, was during ice ages. Warming is good.
Oh, and no, I'm not a political conservative.
Chronological Age Shapes How People Perceive Temperature
"You just don't get the summers we used to get when I was a lad..."
Financial Circumstances Shape How People Perceive Temperature
"Almost froze my ass off last winter, didn't have enough newspapers stocked up since everybody's reading the bloody online bloody news these days..."
and
Number of Children / Grandchildren / Pets Shape How People Perceive Temperature
"Well, Susie has her skating class, then Molly has her hockey game, but Andy and Billy were invited to that Winter Festival / tobogganing birthday party at the same time...oh, and could you walk Rover when you get home?"
Face it, 'perception' of temperature is a pretty worthless measure overall. Stick with the measurements, assign a margin of error (note: not 'corrections') suitable for the technology / location, and go from there.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
People who work in well air conditioned offices don't feel as hot as those who have to perfotm manual labor outside, or in less well cooled (and dehumidified) environments
And people who are very wealthy aren't concerned about global warming, they can just build a new summer home firther north.
Yeah, those are your employees, and you should be allowed how much or little medical care they can have!
*allowed to decide
The democrats were perfectly happy offering the single payer plan where they would not force anyone to buy insurance and a substandard level of care would be force on them by the government. It was the conservative republicans who demanded people be responsible for themselves.
----
TFTFY - and your atrocious run on sentence too.
And it's melting...
No, it's half empty and it's thawing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah. That Heritage Foundation are CRIMINALS for designing such a policy!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... because they are slightly closer to hell.
By requiring them to buy a product from those same profit-mongering (that's a bad thing, right?) corporations? Good plan!
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
When someone tells me it's never been hotter, or colder, than now, I always look up the relevant local stats and history. It's almost always been hotter, or colder, on any given day, at some point in the past 100 years, than it is today. Even when the local weather report says it is a record breaking day, I've come to the conclusion based that their records only go back as far as 10 or 20 years - there's almost always a day in the longer term record that beats it.
I've always thought that facts are facts, and not subject to whims or belief.
So, research funds are being spent on measuring (and eventually manipulating?) public sentiment? Rather than actually counting tree rings, measuring glacial melt, refining atmospheric and oceanic models, etc.
This is what is meant by 'science'?
Have gnu, will travel.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/05/climate-weather-warmest-year-on-record-/1
so I guess people who were motivated by their political ideology to minimize the temperature are what's known as reality-deny fanatics.
Yeah, that's pretty much all there is to say on that topic.
If you're dumb enough to believe the Earth is really getting warmer fast enough for you to feel it.
Oh and just for good measure, this:
http://act.350.org/signup/reckoning/?akid=2086.624457.CWuv92&rd=1&t=2
Here's the analogy. We're all on a ship in the ocean. Engineering below has alerted the captain that we're definitely headed for an iceberg. The rich people who are partying on the ship don't want the party to stop.
Since they're the Big Money on board and have the Big Connections , they have outsized say in what the captain decides to do. They shout down the engineers, accusing them of being jealous of the first class passengers.
The rest of the passengers are worried but unable to get captain to change course.
After a while, engineering gets more and more agitated and the passengers can see the panic in their faces. The first class passengers become more even recalcitrant and adamant because now it's a matter of pride.
The rest of the passengers start quietly meeting amongst themselves, talking in low voices, moving about the ship in small groups.
You guess how this movie finishes.
OK times up. It finishes with a lot of well heeled people floating lifelessly in the frigid waters as the ship veers safely past the iceberg with the passengers on board, safe and going home to their loved ones.
No one is going to let deniers crash this ship and kill everyone on board. There comes a time when no one cares what your "rights" are or if SCOTUS has decided that money is speech or even what fucking SCOTUS says. Civilization at its core isn't based on "civil rights" or "free speech" or SCOTUS decisions. We got by without any of that shit for a few, ten thousand years. It's based on survival. Anyone who threatens survival will find themselves outside of the laws of civilization pretty fucking fast.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you make people fight for their survival, if you're identified as one of the deniers who drove civilization to the brink of extinction you can pretty well plan on dying a pretty fucking barbaric death, possibly involving blow torches and such like medieval -level implements of torture . It's nothing I'd wish on anyone, but moderate, peace loving, live and let live liberal bunny people like me aren't going to be able to hold back revenge seekers very well. Prominent personalities deeply involved with denialism may want to take pause here.
My colleagues think we should spare you from the full horror of what's going to happen when, say, the food web in the ocean begins to collapse. They think that because they think by building bridges we can eventually bring you along, but if we paint the full picture of what the future will bring to your flesh, you'll fucking tighten up, become defensive and go full off into denialand and "stand your ground" until the bitter end.
I have another perspective. I think by explicitly laying out for you likely or possible scenarios and what part you'll play in them your brain will start to work in favor of your own survival despite your pansified, airy-fairy post-modernist "you have your experts and I have mine, you have your reality and I have mine" bullshit you learned from cocksucking FoxNews.
Don't think your money or guns or survivalist skills are going to count for jack fucking shit when the world's intelligence agencies collectively decide that you're a clear and present danger to humanity and bring to the party everything in their labs and the kitchen sink to make sure that your dealt with. That's how this is going to go down in the end because you know what? The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
I would think geographical location during the persons upbringing would have an effect on the perception of temperature. It would also have an effect on political ideology. Correlation != causation. Perhaps temperature perception shapes political ideology.
Condition of housing may also have an effect. Living in a cold area in an expensive warm house would not be the same as living in a cheap cold house. The difference there is the cost of the house and implies a higher family income.
Or is it me?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
They connected the wrong dots. Different political affiliations typically means different age groups which means one has seen more decades of weather which contained other floods and droughts and heat waves so they are less inclined to think there's a change going on.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Obama care was pushed through without many republicans voting for it at all. They manipulated the bill through obscure rules and could have just as easily scammed a single payer provision in it. The fact that you don't see that is probably because the democrats as a whole did not support a single player plan and while some might have, making the idiots think they wanted one thing while doing another which is a common political tactic, ensured their reelection from the voter base.
Psychological theories are just shit someone made up to explain people doing something they think is wrong.
I love how "people with strongly-held beliefs will discard new facts that contradict their beliefs" is always presented as a fault of the human mind. Apparently psychologists have a strongly-held belief that the human mind is inherently faulty, because they don't even consider that there might be some perfectly logical reason for such behavior. Answers like "people are stubborn-minded and refuse to see the truth" are quickly accepted because they're so appealing, whereas more reasonable things, like considering that without doing research personally, people can't ever really know anything, and so any "facts" presented to them are at best "potential facts" which may or may not be wrong. Naturally, those with the strongest opinions are going to be most likely to reject these new "facts," not because their opinions cloud their judgment, but because they obviously have some reason to have strongly held opinions to begin with, and so of course it will be harder to change their mind than to change the mind of someone who has no pre-existing opinions. Honestly, why would anyone expect anything else?
Then there's shit like the above, with those stupid conservatives somehow using scientific and mathematical reasoning to come to the wrong conclusion about global warming. Yes, it must be a fault in the ability of the mind of a conservative to apply scientific and mathematical reasoning. It couldn't have anything to do with a conservative having the motivation to research the facts while their liberal counterparts are merely motivated to continue to "trust the scientists."
If someone shows me one of these psychological studies that finds people who strongly believe that a bowling ball falls faster than a golf ball, and then -- after being allowed to test this belief on their own -- reject the new facts and cling to their previous beliefs, then I'll believe that humans suck at logic. However, as long as all we're doing is telling people that they're wrong and noting that they reject the new facts we have presented them, then I shall continue to believe that it is only the psychologists whose minds are deficient at applying logic. They seem very much to be more interested in discovering something that is interesting than they are interested in discovering the truth.
I have a theory that science was popular in the 50's and 60's because it was all about what we COULD do. When science was telling people we could go to the moon and build better cars and make huge leaps in medicine etc... people loved it. Now that science is telling people what we CAN"T do, at least indefinitely, the same scientific methods that generated such progress are now viewed with suspicion and doubt by people who don't want to change.
When news outlets have to dredge up second rate industry shills to maintain an appearance of a controversy over global climate change, that should be a clue. But some people don't want a clue. They want their gas guzzler.
And that's another thing... I believe officially it is known as global climate change. The average temperature is rising, but that just puts more energy into the global weather system and can lead to swings in temperature either way at a local level.
as long as I can keep my house at whatever temperature I want I don't give a damn about how hot I make yours.
NASA doesn't record much temperature data that I'm aware of. That's the bailiwick of NOAA and the National Weather Service. In other countries their national weather services record the data. NOAA does maintain a worldwide database of temperatures, both raw and adjusted, through the National Climate Data Center and that's the data that NASA uses. The raw data the CRU deleted is still available from the original sources. No one had to start from scratch.
The way it appears to me is that the insurance companies would have put a vast amount of effort into stopping it dead if there was no bribe in it for them. Hillary took their side. Of course the entire thing under even the most extreme proposals was far less "socialist" than Nixon's suggested plan years earlier.
Both sides are to the right of Nixon these days and would call Eisenhower an outright communist. Rupublican Judges stay in the role long enough and the shift is happening so quickly that they look like Democrats before they retire.
Maybe its easier to member things like the house being under water, or there not being rain in 50 something days in an location that averages rainfall multiple times per week.....
I would kill to live somewhere that averages rainfall multiple times per week. Here, it averages rainfall multiple times per hour :(
In other news... Ice cream cause murder.
http://howsocietyworks.blogspot.com/2011/06/ice-cream-causes-crime-and-other-stupid.html
Also, some credit / blame should go to the governor who pioneered such a policy in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, some fellow by the name of Mitt Romney.
I am officially gone from
O'RomneyCare! TM. Brought to you by Pfizer, Baer, Merck and and the good "people" at Goldman Sachs.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Hey, you (I assume) were among the majority of people against having a public option, because that would be socialism . If not, I apologize for pigeonholing, but maybe a little bit of socialism isn't the bad thing the tv news has made it out to be. God-forbid people have more options instead of fewer. And yes, profit-mongering is a bad thing. It's unsustainable and leads to degenerate, uncivilized behavior.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
>>>That Republicans and Tories are all cold-hearted?
What is TRULY cold-hearted is bossing people around as if they were puppets (or too stupid to make their own decisions). The pro-big government types fit that model perfectly. Example:
You WILL buy hopsital insurance, and you WILL buy complete coverage even for piddly $100 doctor visits, because we've arbitrarily decided that catastrophic/high deductible insurance is outlawed (true under both Romney and Obamacare). In fact "cold hearted" is probably too weak a term. "Dictatorial" is probably better. Though they'd probably describe themselves as "parents" over the citzens (who they consider dumb like children).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I doubt the insurance companies would have put much more into it then what is being done by the republicans and other groups.
I also think it is a little disingenuous to bring up failed attempts at the same thing and say it's better then what was already rejected a generation or more ago as if it is somehow validates what some don't like about it today. What we got during the Nixon years was the HMO act creating most of the insurance companies as we see it today which was largely the brainchild of Ted Kennedy who led the charge about how HMO's are evil and he knew how to fix them.
it's prefectly possible that phenomenon A causes a completely unmeasured phenomenon C, and it is phenomenon C that causes phenomenon B.
But if A implies C and C implies B, then A implies B. This is the "hypothetical syllogism", proved here.
You don't want to go around waving your correlation and raving about how A causes B, because you look kind of silly when phenomenon D shows up and independently wipes out C.
Then you've obtained new information about the mechanism: instead of A causing C, A without D causes C. But until such time as you do, the theory that A causes B still best explains the behavior.
The abstract says *nothing* about the results, which is what I'd be interested in knowing.
mark
Per your first paragraph, yeah, in aggregate, you're probably right. My comment was made with the unwritten suffix "in aggregate" because this is about statistics. Perhaps I should have included it.
I'm not sure where you're going with the second paragraph other than a rail against an all or nothing approach to political positions, and on that I agree with you as well. If it was meant as something personal to me... well, I don't get it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I agree that correlation does not imply causation with 100% likelihood. But correlation between A and B implies that either A causes B, B causes A, C causes A and B, or chance. This means a likelihood of roughly 25% that A causes B, which can be increased or decreased by investigating the four possibilities.
Profit is, in fact, the creation of wealth. You take a bunch of input costs (labor, rent, materials etc) worth X and create a product or service worth X + Y, Y being profit. All those lovely socialist "rights" you're so enamored of only exist because of Y. without it, there are no roads, there are no police, there is no government. Degenerate and uncivilized indeed.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
I brought up Nixon to show that some of the current health care bill that some republicans consider the leavings of the devil used to be republican policy. It was based on working examples outside of the USA so it doesn't really matter which side of US politics decided to take it up.
You've still got an insurance system instead of a health system, but maybe it will start paying more attention to health.
This shows how much belief shapes perception, especially when the perception requires not just observations but also a good memory and the ability to correlate lots of data. It’s pretty easy to say whether today is warmer or cooler than yesterday was, but it’s much more difficult to say if last summer or last year as a whole was warmer or cooler than the one before, much less to detect years-long trends over the noise of normal changes. Rain is much easier to remember, because, at least in California, they often talk about how far above or below average the rainfall has been (unless it’s close to average). They do the hard work for you, and all you need to do is remember one thing about each year. I’m sure that is true of most places that worry about droughts or floods or that have lots of crops. For temperature, you won’t usually hear anything unless a record was broken. So it’s not surprising at all that temperature trends are not as accurately discerned and remembered as rainfall, floods and droughts.
In general, the brain tends to fill in patterns where they are missing. I suppose beliefs act as a sort of pattern filler in this case. But it isn’t political beliefs for everyone. For many it is a trust of that the scientific method works pretty well in general and that the majority of scientists are trustworthy. For others it is an almost reflexive reaction to be on the opposite side of any issue that environmentalists (or oil companies) take a side on, which is pretty political. For still others, it is the automatic trust of whatever people on their side of the ideological or political fence are saying, which is purely political.
As I said, it is disingenuous to claim anything about a policy that was never passed into law. You aren't even picking which so called policy that was rejected, you are talking about. Nixon submitted 2 health care plans that got rejected for Kennedy's HMO act.
I'm also not sure where your working policies outside the US are supposed to be. Most all Government health care in other countries comes from an attempt at health care reform from the implementation of article 25 of the UN declaration on human rights passed in 1948. The US did not sign that provision.
But 20 years is hardly enough time to gauge if something is working/successful or not. There certainly are horror stories about them today indicating that if they ever were working, it isn't now or at least at what we would consider an acceptable level. The medical tourism rate in some of these countries is double and even triple that of the US. In Canada, they even sell wait insurance on the private market in case the gods of the government make you wait too long for your treatment- they will fly you to a country with private medical and pay for the treatment there. In England, they have used that as an excuse to deny treatment for any specific illness altogether. If you obtain treatment for any illness they are treating you for outside of their approval, they stop paying for any treatment for that illness altogether.
Now do not get me wrong, I'm not saying our system doesn't need work. It just doesn't need to be mangled into the crap people are not happy with in other countries. We could fix 90% of what is wrong with our system without ever having a mandate or getting rid of insurance or the government telling us what we can and cannot eat.
Both plans were more ambitious than the current one.
And yet both plans were still rejected. You might even say tossed out and forgotten as soon as the HMO act was passed.
And yet both plans were policy which is my entire point.
What did you think my point actually was? I'm curious as to how badly you are misunderstanding me through whatever baggage you are bringing in.
It was Nixon's policy. I find nothing that indicates it was a republican policy other then Nixon having it. Republicans were not some lock step army like they seem to be today back when Nixon was president.
Either way, it was failed policy. Policy that went no where but out of the mouth of one guy. Is it really fair to claim democrats want to nationalize the entire medical profession because Hillary Clinton did in 1993? No, because even when it came down to it, not all democrats supported it and it was a failed policy.
Bringing up Nixon's failed policy is about as ingenuous as saying Iraq and Afghanistan should be supported by democrats because Truman got us involved in 1950 and JFK took us from an advisory role in Vietnam to an active military role with the tripling of troop strength and direct involvement in field operations so it is the same policies. It is a non sequitur and just doesn't work.
You forget that the primaries and before that the tea parties got a lot of press so you can't get away with audacious misrepresentations like that! If you are being honest then you do have an interesting world view and a bit of an odd perspective on modern history, the sort of thing that sufficient education and a free press is supposed to get the general population to grow out of. It looks like the Reagan education cuts really hurt.
Today might have been better served as the recent past.
Tea party candidates ran under the Republican party but that doesn't automatically make them republican. That's why they are called tea party republicans. Either way, they do, even the tea party republicans, seem to follow the leader in lock step opposition to some of the democrats policies.
I also like you have turned this into an ad hominen attack. Are you scared you are losing the argument or something? Perhaps it is you who is all butt hurt over Reagan's cuts in education increases which would explain why you are resorting to these measures.
BTW, the decline in America's education quality can be traced largely back to the creation of the Department of education under the federal government who's marching mantra seems to be throw more money at doing the same things with diminishing results. Of course it's mission was a little different back then than it is now. The federal government should never be involved in education as it is a state and local responsibility with decisions and results determined within that arena.
You are not very observant are you? You are not ranting at your democrat strawman but instead at someone from another nation (and has informed you of such) that doesn't give a shit about the democrats and is old enough not to sodomised by Reagan's cuts even if I had been there. Sorry kid, but you really are the clueless lying redneck political rally poster boy that gives your country a bad name and would make me give up on the entire lot of you and learn Mandarin if I hadn't already met some Americans that are not invincibly ignorant idiots. How's that for ad hominen?