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: The Buck Stops Here

People Who Don't Believe in Their Beliefs

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

So I was reading Reading Beyond Race, by Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines (Harv. Univ. Press, 1997), which analyzes a bunch of survey work about racial attitudes. In an initial chapter, they point out that white opposition to affirmative action was overwhelming even among "the most racially tolerant 1 percent of whites." My immediate reaction was, "So then how did affirmative action ever come about, if almost no one supported it?" A subsequent chapter had the answer. The researchers came up with a very clever idea that they called the "List Experiment," which consisted of giving people a survey in which the interviewer reads a list of things that could possibly upset people (pollution, an increase in gas taxes, etc.), and then asks simply to know how many of the listed items (not which particular items) upset the person being interviewed...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).