A Rose by Any Other Name: The Science of Decision Making

Overview

Objectives/Goals The goal of my experiment is to determine if people judge political policies and ideas based on the merits and logic of the views expressed in the statement being made or if they react more to whom or what group is making the statement or policy. Methods/Materials For this experiment I wrote a single editorial statement; for half the people I surveyed my statement was attributed to a liberal group and for the other half the same statement was attributed to a conservative group. After they wrote down whether they agreed or not I asked them to record their age, gender, education level, and political affiliation. Results I found that for people who listed themselves as middle of the road (neither liberal nor conservative) that they tended to agree with the statement regardless of whom it was attributed to by a 3 to 1 ratio. However, when people listed themselves to be liberal or conservative, the background of who made the statement played an important role in their decision to agree or dissagree with the statement. Conservative subjects aggreed with the statement when attributed to a conservative source by a ratio of 3:1 and dissagreed with the same statement by 3:1 when it was attributed to liberal sources. Conclusions/Discussion My experiment shows that for people who consider themselves to be on either side of the political spectrum that they often times do seem to judge a statement or policy by who or where the authorship comes from, as much as by the content itself.

Competition history

• CSEF 2003 Social Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1701

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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