Cheryl Says She's An Atheist

[koganbot]

Proposal for a social psychology experiment:

We'll use four separate, sizable groups of people, say 75 people in each group. (Not that I know if that amount is any good or not, or if we want our overall pool to be similar socioeconomically. I'm not a statistician.)

Ask each member of Group One:

What arguments would you use to try and persuade an

Comments

[skyecaptain]

Currently reading Us Against Them: The Ethnocentric Foundations of American Politics. This has been a good foundational reading in in- and out-group identification, which seems to be at least part of your interest here. The in- or (more likely) out-group would be "atheists," depending on the respondent's position, and it's likely that people in the in-group AND out-group underestimate how much they know about "Cheryl," even if they'd be quick to define "atheists" according to their at-hand beliefs.

From the book:

[M]embership is not sufficient to establish an in-group, just as the absence of membership is not sufficient to establish an out-group. What is required is psychological striving: attraction and identification in the case of in-groups; condescension and opposition in the case of out-groups.The book persuasively argues that ethnocentrism, though a universal feature of human psychology, is more apparent or less apparent in particular groups and individuals, and is not always related to cogent "group interests." (That is,

[koganbot]

it's likely that people in the in-group AND out-group underestimate how much they know about "Cheryl," even if they'd be quick to define "atheists" according to their at-hand beliefs
Assuming you didn't mistype and mean "overestimate" rather than "underestimate," this is the opposite of what I'd expect. That is, this says that people think they don't know as much about Cheryl as they actually do, and that they therefore have more uncertainty than they should. If this is what Kinder is saying, what does he base it on?

Or is he saying that they often go to their immediate stereotype assumptions but actually know more than their initial response indicates?

My experiment doesn't test these directly; it just tries to see if introducing a name and switching the order of the questions would induce people to have (even?) more uncertainty.

It's certainly not my experience that people (atheist or nonatheist) know more about my beliefs than they think they do, though it's possible that they know more about the average atheist than they think

[skyecaptain]

I did mistype -- meant to say "underestimate how much they DON'T know"! Woops!

[koganbot]

Whew! That's a relief.

[skyecaptain]

Haven't gotten far enough into the book yet, but generally Kinder and Kam so far suggest that out-group identification (and vehemence of that identification) is essentially unrelated to information about the group. One can have a high level of knowledge of an out-group and still be generally condescending and hostile to them, or one can use stereotypes and misinformation to bolster beliefs about large groups. They may go on to clarify to what degree knowledge and attitudes are related or unrelated but I'm not sure yet.

[skyecaptain]

If I had to guess, though, I would assume that "ignorant out-group identification" is far more common than "knowledgable out-group identification." I'm interested in the second kind, though -- it's what I identify in a lot of progressive groups I'm associated with -- an unwillingness to even read the opposing side because of what they (legitimately) know of the side in question. One thing that attracts me to, e.g., Matt Yglesias (along with Krugman and Silver) is (as you say) his ability to articulate the other side's position and act in good faith in providing his own analyses. It leads him to assuming many very progressive and also very traditionally conservative positions (his stance on deregulation of zoning policy, the subject of his ebook "The Rent Is Too Damn High," is actually a strongly free market argument, despite it not being on the radar screen of conservatives or liberals, who tend to resort to the more prosaic forms of ethnocentrism to be found in Not In My Backyard-ism).

[koganbot]

Interesting that they have to use the word "ethnocentrism" when actual ethnicities rarely seem to be at issue.