Posts Tagged ‘public opinion’
“It is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest, that holds human associations together”*…
… and in its absence? Millie Giles on the state of trust in American professions…
When choosing a career, there are several (often contradictory) factors that determine people’s decisions: pay, of course; personal interests; work-life balance; location; public perception; and how a particular job might weigh on their conscience.
But which professions do Americans trust the most?
A recent Gallup poll, [published last Monday], found that 76% of US adults considered nurses to have high or very high honesty and ethical standards, with teachers, military officers, and pharmacists also scoring highly amongst those surveyed.
Conversely, Americans were skeptical about the ethical standards of TV reporters (55% considered low or very low), members of Congress (68%), and lobbyists (68%) — perhaps because the public perception of professionals in political and media-related fields is that many of them have ulterior motives, as is the case with stereotypically mercenary car salespeople and lawyers, which also ranked negatively overall.
Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, infamously said in November 2009 — with the impacts of the global financial crisis still reverberating loudly — that he and his fellow bankers were “doing God’s work.” Ridiculed at the time, he might be pleased to see his once vilified profession ranked not far behind the clergy, per Gallup.
Zooming out: the average of high/very high ethical ratings across the core 11 professions sunk to just 30% in 2024, with trust in medical doctors in particular having dropped 14 percentage points since 2021…
“America’s most trusted professions,” from @sherwood.news @Gallup
* H. L. Mencken
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As we contemplate confidence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that news of the FBI’s Abscam operation, targeting corrupt Congress members and other elected officials, broke publicly. The two-year investigation had initially targeted trafficking in stolen property and illicit business people, but later evolved into a corruption investigation; it led to the convictions of six members of the United States House of Representatives and one member of the United States Senate, along with one member of the New Jersey State Senate, members of the Philadelphia City Council, the Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and an inspector for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The Abscam operation wass dramatized in the 2013 feature film American Hustle, directed by David O. Russell, which received ten Academy Award nominations.
“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing”*…
As the press continues to treat this year’s all–too–consequential election as a horse race, your correspondent is re-visiting a topic touched a few weeks ago: the prevalence of polling data in election coverage. Rick Perlstein weighs in with a (fascinating) history of presidential election polling, then turns to it implications…
… That polls do not predict Presidential election outcomes any better now than they did a century ago is but one conclusion of this remarkable history. A second conclusion lurks more in the background—but I think it is the most important one to absorb.
For most of this century, the work was the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, even among pollsters. In 1948, George Gallup called presidential polling (as distinguished from issue polling, which has its own problems) “this Frankenstein.” In 1980, Elmo Roper admitted that “our polling techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet we seem to be missing more and more elections.” All along, conventional journalists made a remarkably consistent case that they were empty calories that actively crowded out genuine civic engagement: “Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy,” as a 1949 critic put it, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”
Critics rooted for polls to fail. Eric Sevareid, in 1964, recorded his “secret glee and relief when the polls go wrong,” which might restore “the mystery and suspense of human behavior eliminated by clinical dissection.” If they were always right, as James Reston picked up the plaint in 1970, “Who would vote?” Edward R. Murrow argued in 1952 that polling “contributed something to the dehumanization of society,” and was delighted, that year, when “the people surprised the pollsters … It restored to the individual, I suspect, some sense of his own sovereignty” over the “petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think.”
Still and all, the practice grew like Topsy. There was an “extraordinary expansion” in polls for the 1980 election, including the first partnerships between polling and media organizations. The increase was accompanied by a measurable failure of quality, which gave birth to a new critique: news organizations “making their own news and flacking it as if it were an event over which they had no control.”
And so, after the 1980 debacle, high-minded observers began wondering whether presidential polls had “outlived their usefulness,” whether the priesthood would end up “defrocked.” In 1992, the popular columnist Mike Royko went further, proposing sabotage: Maybe if people just lied, pollsters would have to give up. In 2000, Alison Mitchell of The New York Times proposed a polling moratorium in the four weeks leading up to elections, noting the “numbing length … to which polling is consuming both politics and journalism.”
Instead, polling proliferated: a “relentless barrage,” the American Journalism Review complained, the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip. Then, something truly disturbing started happening: People stopped complaining.
A last gasp was 2008, when Arianna Huffington revived Royko’s call for sabotage, until, two years later, she acquired the aggregator Polling.com and renamed it HuffPost Pollster. “Polling, whether we like it or not,” the former skeptic proclaimed, “is a big part of how we communicate about politics.”
And so it is.
Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life. Joshua Cohen tells the story of the time Silver, looking for a way to earn eyeballs between elections, considered making a model to predict congressional votes. But voters, he snidely remarked, “don’t care about bills being passed.”
Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is. Our therapy—headlines like the one on AlterNet last week, “Data Scientist Who Correctly Predicted 2020 Election Now Betting on ‘Landslide’ Harris Win.” Our political masochism: “Holy cow, did you hear about that Times poll.” “Don’t worry, I heard it’s an outlier …”
The Washington Post’s polling director once said, “There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.” He’s right. When we refer to “political junkies,” polls are pretty much the junk.
For some reason, I’ve been able to pretty much swear off the stuff, beyond mild indulgence. Maybe it’s my dime-store Buddhism. I try to stay in the present—and when it comes to the future, try to stick with things I can do. Maybe, I hereby offer myself as a role model?
As a “political expert,” friends, relatives, and even strangers are always asking me, “Who’s going to win?” I say I really have no idea. People are always a little shocked: Prediction has become what people think political expertise is for.
Afterward, the novelty of the response gets shrugged off, and we can talk. Beyond polling’s baby talk. About our common life together, about what we want to happen, and how we might make it so. But no predictions about whether this sort of thing might ever prevail. No predictions at all…
Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?
Eminently worth reading in full. Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives? “The Polling Imperilment,” from @rickperlstein in @TheProspect.
Pair with: “The Problems with Polls.”
For more on why today’s polls are so flawed, see “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
Apposite: from the estimable James Fallows: “Election Countdown, 38 Days to Go: What Is Wrong With Our Leading Paper?“
* J. B. Priestley
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As we pray for more consequential coverage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that the (then-venerable) Literary Digest mailed out return postcard to 2,000,000 Americans, asking them to return the card with an indication for whether they would be voting in the upcoming presidential election for incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt or challenger Alf Landon. They published the results of their anxiously-anticipated poll in their October 31 issue: a massive victory for Landon. In the event, of course, Roosevelt defeated Landon in an unprecedented landslide.
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”*…
We live, Taylor Orth reports, in a time in which everything is awful… for everyone else…
Ask Americans about life’s challenges, and you’ll find a common theme: They are, on average, a lot more positive about the state of their own lives than about the lives of everyone else in the country. In a recent experiment, YouGov asked Americans to rate 14 aspects of life on a scale from terrible to excellent. Respondents were divided into three randomly selected groups of equal size. Depending on the group, they were asked either about their own life, the lives of people in their local community, or the lives of people in the country at large.
At least half of Americans rate many aspects of their own life — including their healthcare, educational opportunities, social relationships, and employment situation — as either good or excellent. Positive ratings are somewhat less likely to be given by Americans evaluating people in their local area, and far less likely among those evaluating people in the U.S. as a whole.
The largest gap in ratings of one’s self compared to ratings of Americans overall is on mental health: People are 42 percentage points more likely to say their own mental health is excellent or good than they are to say so about people in the country as a whole. Gaps of 20 points or more are also found for positive ratings of one’s own versus the country’s personal safety (+31), physical health (+28), access to healthcare (+27), housing affordability (+25), and social relationships (+24)…
“More Americans have a positive outlook on their own lives than on their fellow Americans’,” from Taylor Orth at @YouGovAmerica.
Consider with: “Right-wing populist parties have risen. Populism hasn’t.” (“The success of these parties isn’t about a surge in populist sentiments…”)
* Margaret Mead
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As we ponder perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Lottie Williams became the first (and so far, only) human to be struck by a remnant of a space vehicle (a Delta II rocket, after it’s re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere).
Lottie Williams is strolling through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she sees a flash of light resembling a meteor. A short while later, she is struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal apparently from a disintegrating rocket, making her the only person believed to have been hit by a piece of space debris.
… NASA confirmed that the timing and location of the incident were consistent with the re-entry and breakup of a second-stage Delta rocket that fell to Earth after orbiting for several months. The main wreckage was recovered a couple of hundred miles away in Texas.
Williams was not injured. She was struck a glancing blow, and the debris was relatively light and probably traveling at a low velocity. It was also subject to wind currents, which mitigated the impact even further.
The amazing thing is that, given the amount of space junk that falls to Earth on a regular basis, there have been no other reports of someone being hit. Despite the veritable junkyard raining down on our planet — over a 40-year period roughly 5,400 tons of debris are thought to have survived re-entry into the atmosphere — the odds of actually being struck are infinitesimally small.
“Jan. 22, 1997: Heads Up, Lottie! It’s Space Junk!”
… The rest of the 260-kilogram tank, from which the fragment that hit her had come out, fell in Texas, near a farm. The piece was analyzed by researcher Winton Cornell of the University of Tulsa, who concluded that the material was used by NASA to insulate fuel tanks. The U.S. secretary of defense then sent a letter to Williams, apologizing for what happened…
“Lottie Williams, the Woman Who Was Hit by Space Junk”
“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do”*…
André Forget with an appreciation of an all-too-timely classic…
One hundred years ago, a young American journalist named Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion. Though it is one of the most important books of the twentieth century and still acknowledged as a foundational text in the study of social psychology, media, and propaganda, its centenary has passed, for the most part, unacknowledged. This is ironic, because its central question—put simply, “How can a truly self-governing society function under the conditions of ‘mass culture’?”—has rarely been more relevant. Our current debates about disinformation and the pernicious effects of social media could be rather more productive if the participants would bother to read Lippmann—not because Lippmann provides any workable solutions, but because his analysis of the extent of the problem is so clear-eyed.
…
Lippmann’s book stands as the first attempt to comprehensively explain how individual psychology, political and social movements, and the mass media both create and unravel shared experiences of reality. The argument he lays out is fairly straightforward: Most of what we think we know about the world has been filtered down to us through external sources, and this information creates a sort of mental map, a collection of simplified representations of the world that help us navigate it more effectively. Inevitably, the accuracy and detail of our maps is directly related to our individual needs and interests—my mental map, for example, contains a great deal of information about Canadian literature, and almost none about how my computer works—but even the things we think we know are mostly just agglomerations of facts we’ve taken on trust from people and institutions relaying them at second- or third-hand. My confidence in saying that reality as I understand it corresponds to the real environment around me is a barometer of my faith in the sources of my information.
The mental maps we carry in our heads determine how we will act in the world, though they will not determine the outcomes of our actions. If I believe that Alaska has white sand beaches, I might book a holiday in Anchorage, but I will probably be disappointed after I arrive. While personal experience can help us correct misconceptions, not everyone can have personal experience of everything that affects their life, so the more abstracted from our personal experience a problem becomes, the more we will need to rely on the guidance and expertise of others. But these guides and experts are also finite individuals who must rely, in turn, on guidance and expertise from other sources, and the information they provide is shaded by their own prejudices and interests, as well as the inevitable distortions and elisions involved in any process of simplification and transmission…
If Lippmann is basically right—and it seems difficult, then as now, to argue that he isn’t—then the implications for democracy are troubling. When we invoke the rule of “the people,” we are invoking an abstraction, because the public body is in fact made up of an endless array of sets and classes and interests, cultivated and then pandered to by opinion-mongers and press barons who inflame the worst impulses of their audiences in order to create a steady market for their content. This is the opposite of the sort of feverish conspiracy about how the press works that cranks of all kinds have stipulated. If there is a larger purpose at work, it is generally of the most venal sort, often directed by nothing more than the need to present an opinion opposite to that of one’s competitor. If you squint, something like consensus may emerge during one moment of crisis or another, but it is usually illusory, and always fleeting.
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Arguments about the relationship between freedom and information are present in the founding of modern democracy. A decade before the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain, the rebel John Adams had argued that “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” But the president John Adams sang a different tune when “general knowledge” became a threat to his administration. Seen from a certain angle, the Sedition Act of 1798 is the U.S. government’s first attempt to combat disinformation. The relationship between a truly free press and functional democratic government has been strained from the beginning, and if the tension between the two seemed particularly fraught in Lippmann’s age, it wasn’t for the first or the last time…
Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever: “Public Opinion at 100,” from @ayforget in @BulwarkOnline. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“There are two kinds of pedestrians- the quick and the dead”*…
The story of one of the greatest public opinion campaign “victories” in American history…
In the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America — by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. They convinced the public that if you got run over by a car, it was your fault. Pedestrians were to blame. People didn’t belong in the streets; cars did.
It’s one of the most remarkable (and successful) projects to shift public opinion I’ve ever read about. Indeed, the car companies managed to effect a 180-degree turnaround. That’s because before the car came along, the public held precisely the opposite view: People belonged in the streets, and automobiles were interlopers…
In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language: “The Invention of ‘Jaywalking‘,” from Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99).
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As we watch our steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1923, at the outset of the campaign to push pedestrians off of streets, that the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (supplier of tires for Ford’s Model T, and the largest tires company in the U.S.) introduced the first production “balloon tire.” Unlike earlier solid rubber or simple pneumatic tires, the balloon tire fitted an inflatable inner tube inside a rugged outer tire, providing both better handling and a smoother ride. Firestone also bragged of greater longevity and more economical driving, though those benefits never clearly emerged. But what, of course, Firestone’s innovation did usher in was the era of the flat tire.
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