Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

pnas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 208 posts

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#41

Post by btilly »

godelski wrote: post #29
dnissley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples? IIRC, many such orders signed by Trump were immediately undone or at the very least drastically watered down by Biden.

Not an executive order, but what led to the 2009 financial crisis was mostly done under the Clinton administration. Honestly I think this is something us humans are really bad at (well we're known to be bad at this). Understanding causal effects through time. Not only are we bad at understanding causal facts but we're really bad at being forward thinking and understanding temporal phenomena. But I think the main poin…

I have no idea what you think happened under the Clinton era to cause the financial crash of 2009. Most of the immediate things, such as the housing boom driven by easy lending policies, happened under Bush.

So I'd need a reference to support that idea.

However I'll give you another one. Most people's impression is that Carter destroyed the economy and Reagan's deregulation saved the day. But actually the facts are almost exactly reversed - Carter did the deregulating but the benefits were not seen until Reagan was in power.

See https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-a... for a reference.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#42

Post by joe-collins »

godelski wrote: post #18

The actual title is > Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change Not "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." And from the abstract > Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). (o…

I don't know the statistical tools to properly validate it, but to my eye, it looks like the study participants actually tend to do a solid job of estimating the rate of change within the past handful of years. Their awareness of the absolute values is more scattered, but their knowledge of very recent relative change is better than I would have guessed from the abstract.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#43

Post by lkrubner »

It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée

"The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns."

We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#44

Post by pvg »

larsiusprime wrote: post #37
godelski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be able to edit. I'm unsure, if not maybe Dang will come around and do it for you.

Is title editing a new feature? Little nervous, didn't expect it to rocket immediately to the #1 spot, trying my best not to get trouble in here

Not a new feature, you can fix it or if the time has passed, a mod will eventually fix it. But you're not going to get in trouble either for making an honest mistake or trying to fix it.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#45

Post by [deleted] »

unwise-exe wrote: post #39

> Significance > People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people’s efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. People can't follow the herd if they don't know where the herd is going.

[deleted]

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#46

Post by randomdata »

larsiusprime wrote: post #32
alexfromapex wrote: post #30

[deleted]

The authors are using this an example of a widespread thing people think is true (that belief in god has gone from ubiquitous to uncommon), but that is not actually true (belief in god has decreased, but not by as much as people think), the subject of what the article measures.

The referenced GALLOP poll only asked if the respondents believe in God/believe in a God.

Pew Research conducted a similar study and found that 90% of respondents believe in a higher power, which echos GALLOP, but only 56% believe in God as described in the Bible.

It's not clear what percentage of people believed in the Bible's God 60 years ago, but if we, for argument's sake, assume 90-100% then 56% support now is comparatively uncommon. Under those assumptions, it would be quite reasonable to think that religious culture has changed dramatically.

The key takeaway here is that communication is hard and that data is easy to twist.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#47

Post by lettergram »

I think this is a product of mass social media and mass media. Effectively, we amplify propaganda one way or another. It leads to false impressions and we are unable to make decisions based off real information.

This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education.

Easy example, we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. Yet our perception is skewed because of what we see in the news / shared.

Truly, most of our understanding is skewed in such a manner. That’s why ignoring anecdotal stories is so important for rational policy discussion. Unfortunately, mass media & social media (imo) is really making it impossible.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#48

Post by 4ududjwhe »

godelski wrote: post #18

The actual title is > Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change Not "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." And from the abstract > Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). (o…

> It especially makes sense when you consider we're isolating our social groups more

I wouldn't really pin this one on the internet. Consensus Spaces are the new normal, people have realized the dialogue is a waste of time at best and a trap to give the other side a soap box at worst. Everyone laughed at the lgbt community for it at first but the reality is that those same people took notes and realized that it was actually an extremely clever way to help propagate ideas amongst a target demographic. This strategy is popular irl and in cyberspace now (anyone coming from a college campus recently will have some experience with spaces designed to this attitude) it's just much easier/faster to make Consensus Spaces online.

Post reply on HN