Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity (2012)

Post by shoo » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 3:45 AM UTC

LimpWristed wrote: post #10

shoo wrote: post #8

This topic roughly reminds me of Jeff Schmidt's book "Disciplined Minds"[1], where he argues that professionals are likely to be more conservative and trusting of the government that other people, in part due to the process of professional education. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter: > Evidence that professionals are not independent thinkers has been around for a long time but has generally been ignored, in…

> more conservative and trusting of the government Don't American conservatives tend to distrust gov in general? Or is it more like nonprofessional + conservative = distrusting of gov?

I am not sure. That said, it does seem that people from the US place an unusually large degree of trust in business, and less trust in government [1]. I have read that there has been a great deal of money spent in the US on pro-business propaganda over the last century [2], so perhaps results like these are not so surprising!

[1] See the graph in this Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/02/05/america...

[2] This is discussed at length in the book "Collision Course" by Kerryn Higgs. See: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

Post by dmichulke » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 6:08 AM UTC

The measurement of the target variable, here attitude extremity, seems a little shaky to me.

First of all, using min and max values is not very smart because of outliers and complete disregard of the "coherence" of the opinions, i.e., if standard deviation is small or big (comparatively).

Secondly, the formula is not symmetric. Maybe that's ok because the distributions aren't but using the maximum in the denominator of the attitude extremity formula just increases the effect my first point.

I think a definition in terms of percentiles would have been probably much better. This would implicitly define attribute extremity in terms of non-conformity but that's IMO exactly what it is, it would just sound less dangerous and more 'revolutionarish'.

Re: Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity (2012)

Re: Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity (2012)