At least, that’s the conclusion of a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
It’s a common observation that some survey responses, if taken seriously, imply many partisans are dumber than a sack of hammers. My favorite example is the 32% of respondents who said the Gulf of Mexico oil well explosion made them more likely to support off-shore oil drilling.
As Dylan Matthews writes in the Washington Post, though, the research suggests people do know better. Ordinarily they give the approved politically-correct answer for their party
In the control group, the authors find what Bartels, Nyhan and Reifler found: There are big partisan gaps in the accuracy of responses. …. For example, Republicans were likelier than Democrats to correctly state that U.S. casualties in Iraq fell from 2007 to 2008, and Democrats were likelier than Republicans to correctly state that unemployment and inflation rose under Bush’s presidency.
But in an experimental group where correct answers increased your chance of winning a prize, the accuracy improved markedly:
Take unemployment: Without any money involved, Democrats’ estimates of the change in unemployment under Bush were about 0.9 points higher than Republicans’ estimates. But when correct answers were rewarded, that gap shrank to 0.4 points. When correct answers and “don’t knows” were rewarded, it shrank to 0.2 points.
This is probably good news for journalism and for democracy. It’s not such good news for statisticians.