An interesting study

From an article title Born This Way? in the May issue of Reason Magazine (not yet available online):

In a study I conducted with colleagues Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answer as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.”

I’d realized years ago from talking to both liberals and conservatives that conservatives generally understood liberals pretty well (they just disagree with them) while liberals are so far off base about conservatives as to border on delusional. I’d wondered if this was true in general, or just a peculiarity of the people I came in contact with, so it’s interesting to see a study confirming that it is in fact true in general.