Doubts cast on recent survey of college students’ attitudes toward free speech

September 24, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Four days ago I wrote about the results of a poll of American college students’ attitudes towards free speech. That poll was conducted by UCLA professor and Brookings senior fellow John Villasenor, and was supported by the Charles Koch Foundation. The results were scary, with 44% of all students thinking that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, 51% of students finding it acceptable to shout over a speaker to squelch their presentation, and 19% of students saying that it was okay to use violence to disrupt a speaker whose words were “offensive and hurtful.”

I now feel obliged to report that, according to a piece in Friday’s Guardian, the results of this poll have been heavily questioned by some experts. Since the poll’s methods hadn’t been published at the time (the author felt it important to release the data before they were peer reviewed), there may be some serious problems. As the Guardian notes,

The way the survey results have been presented are “malpractice” and “junk science” and “it should never have appeared in the press”, according to Cliff Zukin, a former president of the American Association of Public Opinion Polling, which sets ethical and transparency standards for polling.

John Villasenor, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California Los Angeles, defended his survey as an important window into what he had called a troubling atmosphere on American campuses in which “freedom of expression is deeply imperiled”. Villasenor, a cybersecurity expert, said this was the first public opinion survey he had conducted.

However, his survey was not administered to a randomly selected group of college students nationwide, what statisticians call a “probability sample”. Instead, it was given to an opt-in online panel of people who identified as current college students.

“If it’s not a probability sample, it’s not a sample of anyone, it’s just 1,500 college students who happen to respond,” Zukin said, calling it “junk science”.

“It’s an interesting piece of data,” Michael Traugott, a polling expert at the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies, said. “Whether it represents the proportion of all college students who believe this is unknown.”

. . . [Villasenor] secured funding from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation to survey students this August about their views on free speech. Rather than write an academic paper, he posted some of his results online this week, arguing that given “the timeliness of the topic, I believe it is important to get some of the key results out into the public sphere immediately”.

. . . Villasenor’s results had gone through no peer review process. The methodology section of his online post was vague, prompting several polling experts to question how reliable the survey’s conclusions might be.

Villasenor wrote in an email that he was reluctant to give a yes or no “sound bite” answer to the question of whether the students he surveyed were nationally representative of college students or not.

By some measures, Villasenor wrote, the 1,500 respondents to his survey had seemed to reflect the rough demographic makeup of American college students. By others, they might not.

Villasenor had calculated a margin of error for his survey results and included it in the public writeup of his report, even though the sample of students he had surveyed was not random. Public polling experts said this was inappropriate and a basic error. Zukin called it “very misleading” and “malpractice”.

By including a margin of error, the author appears to be “trying to overstate the quality of his survey”, said Chris Jackson, the vice-president of Ipsos Public Affairs, a public opinion firm.

Timothy Johnson, the current president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, called it “really not appropriate”.

Jackson also notes that asking this question right after the Charlottesville marches and killing might have conditioned students to be more disapproving of offensive speech than normal.

The lack of a random sample is indeed disturbing (I may be guilty of not catching that), and we’ll see if this thing gets published. My guess is still that students will still be shown to be remarkably ignorant of the First Amendment, and likely to take a more punitive attitude toward “hate speech” than mandated by U.S. courts, but we’ll see.

On the non-reading of books by Americans

February 15, 2017 • 11:00 am

I’ve long heard the claim that the average American reads less than one book a year, but a Pew Poll released last November shows that that’s not accurate—in two ways. First, as I note below, the concept of “books read by the average American” isn’t accurate, as the concept of “the average American” is meaningless on this issue. More important, that figure is in fact an underestimate, for 74% of American have read at least one book in the year preceding the survey, and the median value among Americans is four books per year (the median is the number of books read that is exceeded by half the population, and not achieved by the other half; in other words, it’s the number of books read that divides the population into equal moieties). The mean, as I show below, is much higher than that.

The full report (based on phone surveys of 1,520 adults age 18 or over) is here, but the general results are shown in the following figure:

The data above are for at least one book, but the full report gives the median values:

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-8-48-29-am

In the Appendix you can see that the mean (average) number of books is much higher than the median, which means one thing: a few Americans read a lot of books while many more American read few books. The disparity is large, with the mean being roughly three times higher than the median:

The upshot:

Women read more than men
Blacks and Hispanics read less than non-Hispanic whites
Young people read more than older people (I suspect that some of this reading is assigned for school)
As expected, the amount of reading goes up with level of education, as it does with income (they did not, as far as I know, remove the cross-correlation of these factors, or with ethnicity and education)
Urban dwellers are more likely to have read at least one book, but don’t differ from the suburban or rural population in the median number of books read.

Finally, despite the wider availability of e-books and audiobooks in recent years, American’s still prefer to read paper books than the other two types, though the number who have read e-books and audiobooks has grown in the past five years. But the number who have read at least one book in paper, or in any format, has remained fairly constant.

I don’t have much to say about that; four books a year seems like a decent amount, though I’m sure many of us read a lot more than that.

In the end, the question, “how many books does the average American read” can’t be answered meaningfully because “the average American”, whoever that is, is not at issue. One meaningful answer is this: the average number of books read by an American is 12. But even that misses a lot of the information, for given the skew in the number of books read per year, which must look something like what’s below, another important result is this: far more than half of all Americans read fewer than 12 books.

skew_3 — In a “right skewed” distribution, like this, the mean exceeds the median. This would be the kind of plot you’d get if you put “number of books read” on the X-axis and “number of Americans reading each number of books” on the Y-axis

h/t: Grania

Your vote needed in Virginia poll on a church vs. state issue

February 10, 2016 • 1:52 pm

According to WAVY.com, the sheriff’s office in Poquosan-York, Virginia has decided to put “In God We Trust” decals on all its police cars; the decals cost $1480, paid for personally by Sheriff J. D. “Danny” Diggs. The report:

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.” Diggs said. “It honors God. God has been good to me and this agency.”

Diggs says he has been thinking about putting the decals on the cars for almost two years.

In Monday’s post, Diggs stated:

“Having ‘In God We Trust’ on our vehicles does not injure or threaten anyone. It is not an attempt to urge anyone to support or convert to any one religion. God has blessed me and the Sheriff’s Office. This is one way of honoring God by acknowledging Him for His blessings upon us and it shows our patriotism by displaying our national motto.”

. . . Diggs also stated Monday, “The legislatures and courts approve, and God is most certainly approving of this.”

From God’s mouth to Diggs’s ear!

The decals:

There’s also this:

Diggs also said Monday, “Based on the experience of others who have done this, there will certainly be a very small minority that will criticize.”

Really—only a small minority?? Well, we shall see, for there’s a public poll on that page (access the site by clicking on the screenshot below and scroll down the page to see the poll):

And right now the First Amendment is losing! The latest results:

So go over there and vote your conscience. But if I wake up tomorrow morning and the vote is still 2/3 in favor of God decal, I’ll be sorely disappointed. All I know is that we have 38,000+ subscribers to this site.

Plus, I think there’s a Himalayan cat somewhere in Colorado who won’t like the way the votes are going. . .

h/t: jsp

The new Pew survey: religiosity in America continues to decrease, “nones” are biggest group among Democrats

November 4, 2015 • 12:15 pm

This time I won’t digest the whole thing for you, as the title of the newly released Pew Survey, called “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” tells the tale (full pdf here). But they try to leaven the “bad” news with some other findings:

Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.

But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.

Here are a few graphs and tables showing that “nones” are increasing:

And the percentage of “nones” who are atheists and agnostics, as opposed to simply believing in God but not having formal church affiliation, is growing—from 22% to 33% over seven years:

From the survey:

Declining Religiosity. At the same time, the share of the population with low levels of observance (e.g., those who seldom or never pray or go to religious services, and who say religion is unimportant in their lives) has, itself, grown. And the percentage of American adults who are highly observant – at least as measured by traditional indicators, such as their certainty of belief in God, frequency of prayer, self-reported rates of attendance at worship services and self-assessments of the importance of religion in their lives – has declined.

As I predicted (this isn’t rocket science), America is inexorably, but slowly, becoming increasingly secular. More good news is that attitudes towards gays have changed: acceptance of homosexuality has increased across both believers and secularists—another inexorable trend showing “the better angels of our nature.”

Finally, those of you who want to see the religious breakdown of American Democrats versus Republicans, here it is. God bless those secular Democrats! And look at the difference in the proportion of evangelical Protestants between the parties. This is why the GOP is so gaga for Ben Carson, and why all the Republicans fight to outdo each other in goddiness during their debates:

24% of British Muslims say violence against cartoonists who draw Muhammad is justifiable

February 25, 2015 • 11:15 am

Yes, British Muslims.

ComRes polled British Muslims on their feelings about discrimination, fealty for Britain, and their attitudes towards those who satirize Islam or Muhammed. Here is a summary of poll results, which the BBC seems to see as reassuring, but I beg to differ:

Here’s the breakdown of the Charlie Hebdo question:

And the breakdown of the Muhammed violence question:

Asked if acts of violence against those who publish images of the Prophet Muhammad can “never be justified”, 68% agreed that such violence was never justifiable.

But 24% disagreed with the statement, while the rest replied “don’t know” or refused to answer.

The response to the final question, about Muslim clerics who preach violence, should give pause to those who decry critics of extremism as “Islamophobes”, and who assert that extremist jihadist Islam is not a “true” version of the faith. While 49% of British Muslims say that their clerics who preach anti-Western violence are out of touch with mainstream Muslim opinion, almost as many—45%—say those clerics are not out of touch. If nearly half of British Muslims see calls for such violence as a part of “mainstream Muslim opinion,” even if the respondents don’t agree with violence, who are Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, and Karen Armstrong to say that violence against the West is “not true Islam”?

Below is the BBC’s headline for the story, which of course is technically true, but what about the 27% of British Muslims who have sympathy for the “motivations behind” the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the 24% who claim that sometimes violence against those who publish images of Muhammed is justifiable. Isn’t that bigger news?

Screen Shot 2015-02-25 at 10.23.44 AM

Ah, the Beeb: ever soft on Islam.

h/t: Coel

More about the Pew poll on evolution acceptance

January 7, 2014 • 1:30 am

NOTE BY JAC: I still am baffled by the Pew’s finding that Republicans seem to have become more creationist between 2009 and 2013, for the Gallup Poll shows the 20% disparity already in 2008. In that poll, the percentage of young-earth creationists was 60% among Republicans, 38% among Democrats, and 40% among Independents. The gap that Pew says is widening, then, appears in the Gallup data to have been that wide already five years ago. Since the issue is the same, human evolution, I can only attribute it to different sampling techniques or, as Greg suggests below, to the order in which questions were asked.

______

by Greg Mayer

I’ve already posted twice on the Pew poll on evolution acceptance, first to bring it to WEIT readers’ attention while noting the disparity between the Pew poll and Gallup’s results on the same issue, and then to note an erroneous criticism of the poll by Dan Kahan. I’d like to note three further developments.

The most interesting is a further report from Pew written by Cary Funk (if you look at nothing else mentioned here, look at this report), I’ll mention two other items first.

First, Charles Blow at the New York Times, in a piece entitled “Indoctrinating Religious Warriors“, considers what the poll says about the political and religious landscape of America. He’s saddened by the fact that more Republicans now accept creationism than evolution:

In fact, this isn’t only sad; it’s embarrassing.

I don’t personally have a problem with religious faith, even in the extreme, as long as it doesn’t supersede science and it’s not used to impose outdated mores on others.

But as Blow well knows, the only religious extremists that make the news are precisely the ones who want their faith to supercede science and to impose their mores on the rest of society. He attributes its recrudescence to the strategy of the Republican party:

But I believe that something else is also at play here, something more cynical. I believe this is a natural result of a long-running ploy by Republican party leaders to play on the most base convictions of conservative voters in order to solidify their support. Convince people that they’re fighting a religious war for religious freedom, a war in which passion and devotion are one’s weapons against doubt and confusion, and you make loyal soldiers.

There has been anti-science propagandizing running unchecked on the right for years, from anti-gay-equality misinformation to climate change denials.

Second, Andrew Sullivan, in “Converting to Belief in Evolution“, has looked at the poll again, and points to Karl Giberson (whom Jerry also commented on) asking whether evangelical Christianity’s antagonism to science will push young people away from evangelical Christianity. Giberson found this prospect “alarming”, but evidently Andrew doesn’t. (As a gay Catholic who accepts at least theistic evolution, Andrew has longstanding political and theological differences with evangelicalism.)

Finally, Dan Kahan has accepted that his chief argument against the Pew poll—that its reported numbers must be incorrect—is wrong. He did so in response to a commenter on his site, who provided a hypothetical numerical example refuting Kahan’s assertion. I showed that Kahan was in error with a general argument about the statistics of sums, but a concrete counterexample is also a satisfying form of refutation. But most importantly, Pew, without mentioning Kahan, has released a detailed answer to the question that Kahan thought indicated numerical hanky-panky: “If the views of the overall public have remained steady, and there has been little change among people of other political affiliations, how does one account for the Republican numbers? Shouldn’t the marked drop in Republican believers cause a decline in the 60% of all adults who say humans have evolved over time?” The answer is of course ‘not necessarily, and, in fact, not in this case’.

Kudos to Kahan for accepting the invalidity of his mathematical argument, but, oddly, he continues unchanged in his animus toward the Pew poll and one of its striking findings (see the updates and a further post here). As I said, his reactions to the poll seem to be “merely expressions of his own prejudices”, and not terribly dependent on the actual poll results, since he continues to hold them although though his conclusions on the poll have been shown to be in error. The whole sequence of what he writes about the poll is a wonderful example of the type of reasoning which, in another context, Sam Wang of Princeton has called “motivated reasoning“.

The new Pew report (which, as I said, is the thing really worth looking at here), clearly answers Kahan’s doubts. Here’s their table nicely illustrating, neither generally nor hypothetically, that there’s nothing wrong with their numbers (note that the last column shows, as stated in my first post, that the overall result is a weighted sum that includes all political response classes):

But what was the cause of the shift in Republican opinion? It’s not obviously due to changes in the demographic, religious, or ideological profiles of the Republican party, as they changed little between the two surveys:

To my mind, the most interesting new nugget in this report is that the biggest shift of Republicans toward creationism has occurred among the least religious Republicans. From the report:

In fact, however, the surveys suggest that the change in views on evolution occurred especially among the less religious segments of the GOP. Among Republicans who attend worship services monthly or less often, the share who say humans have evolved over time is down 14 percentage points, from 71% in 2009 to 57% today. Among Republicans who attend services at least weekly the share who believe in evolution has gone from 36% in 2009 to 31% today, a difference that is not statistically significant.

This may support the suggestion of, among others, Zack Beauchamp and Paul Krugman that accepting creationism has become part of Republicans’ “team” or “tribal” identity: very religious Republicans were already mostly creationist for religious reasons, and now less religious Republicans are following for reasons of party solidarity. (Oddly, Kahan, who called Krugman’s response to the poll “absurd” and “devoid of reflection”, seems to agree with this as well.)

The new Pew report also considers the possibility of wording issues affecting the response. In this case, it was not the wording of the questions on evolution (which were unchanged), but the words of the preceding questions. The 2009 survey was full of questions on science, which may have “primed” respondents to give more ‘scientific’ answers, while in the 2013 survey the evolution questions were preceded by religious questions. I would not be surprised if such differences have an effect; such wording effects may account for some of the disparities between Pew and Gallup results on the same issues.

What, if anything, is wrong with the Pew poll on evolution acceptance?

January 3, 2014 • 10:07 am

by Greg Mayer

I posted on Wednesday about the new Pew poll on evolution acceptance, focusing on the divergence between the Pew results and those from 2012’s Gallup poll of the same issue. In both polls it is possible to divide respondents into three classes that can be thought of as those that accept “naturalistic evolution”, those that accept “theistic evolution”, and those that accept “creationism”. The Pew poll shows a greater preponderance of the first two (32% and 24%, respectively, with 32% creationist) than does the Gallup poll (15% and 32%, respectively, with 46% creationist). I considered how differences in wording between the two polls might have affected their results, but could not come to any convincing explanation for the disparity.

The Pew poll was also noticed in the general media (e.g. MSNBC, Reuters, NPR, Christian Science Monitor), and most of these have emphasized in their stories the fact that creationism is much more popular among Republicans than Democrats and independents (a plurality, 48%, of Republicans are creationist, while 43% accept evolution), and that the popularity of creationism among Republicans has increased notably since the last time Pew polled this question in 2009 (at that time, a majority of Republicans, 54%, accepted some form of evolution, while 39% were creationist). The headline from the Christian Science Monitor, “Percentage of Republicans who believe in evolution is shrinking”, is representative.

A number of commentators– for example Andrew Sullivan, David Graham at the Atlantic, Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress, Allapundit at Hot Air, and Francis X. Clines and Paul Krugman at the New York Times– have also taken note of the Pew poll, and offered various suggestions as to what has happened to increase Republican support for creationism since 2009. (Only Allahpundit took up the question I found most interesting– why did the Pew results diverge from those of Gallup; he also noted differences between Pew and recent Yougov and Harris polls as well.) The two logical possibilities are that Republicans have shifted their views, becoming more creationist; or that creationists have shifted their party allegiance, more of them becoming Republicans, while those who accept evolution have become independents or Democrats.

Both of these type of shifts, of Republicans to creationism and of party allegiance, could be happening, and both have been suggested by one or another of the commentators. Beauchamp, for example, suggests that out-of-power Republicans are rallying to the “team” position, while also noting that white evangelical Protestants have shifted their party allegiance toward the Republicans. Graham pointed to some evidence that scientists have also shifted, and are less likely to be Republicans now than in the past.

While most commentators have offered interpretations or explanations of the Pew results, Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School has questioned the results themselves, and complained about the media’s headlining of the Republican embrace of creationism. His complaints received increased attention because they were tweeted by noted science journalist Carl Zimmer, who wrote that Kahan had “pick[ed the Pew poll] apart”. Jerry, with a nod to Zimmer, has taken note of Kahan’s piece in an addendum to my post.

So does Kahan land any blows on the Pew poll? Well, yes and no. He criticizes Pew for not releasing the full crosstabs on their poll, and on this point I share his frustration. In the Pew press release, there’s a link for the “Full Report“, but this leads to a pdf consisting of the press release plus a subset of the exact questions with answers. It would have been nice to know how party affiliation correlated with naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, for example.

But Kahan then goes on to make two further complaints, neither of which stand up. First, he says that if we knew what percent of Democratic respondents could be classed as accepting naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, this would change the entire cast of the results, from a “ha ha ha!” at Republicans’ expense, to…. ?; it’s not entirely clear what, but it apparently would be “complicated and interesting”. But knowing this about Democrats would not change the main news about party allegiance: 48% of Republicans are creationists. No matter how the Democrats divide on naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, it’s not going to stop Republicans from looking really bad.

The only way to really alter the import of the Pew results on evolution acceptance and party allegiance is if the numbers are actually wrong, not just misinterpreted, and that’s the complaint that Kahan takes up next. Now, both Allahpundit and I considered the possibility that Pew’s numbers are wrong in the sense that, given other polling data, Pew’s numbers may not be good estimates of true public opinion. But Kahan apparently believes Pew’s numbers don’t add up on their own terms, that there is some “logical inconsistency” in the numbers. He arrives at this conclusion by arguing that since the percentage of Democrats and independents accepting or rejecting evolution has not changed, but the percentage of Republicans who are creationists has gone up, then it should be the case that there should have been an overall decline in acceptance of evolution:

And logically, in that case, the % of the U.S. public overall who now say they are “creationists” would have had to gone up–especially insfoar as the proportion of the population identifying as Republican has increased a lot since 2009 …[note: assuming we include “lean Republican” “independents” in the totals, as we should if we are trying to give an accurate senes of partisan identification]. [Kahan’s brackets– GCM]

But according to Pew there has been no change in overall acceptance, leading Kahan to conclude:

So, something does not compute.

At a minimum, Pew has some ‘splainin to do, if in fact it is trying to edify people rather than feed the apptetite of those who make a living exciting fractious group rivalries among culturally diverse citizens.

But Kahan is wrong about three things here. First, the proportion of the population that identifies as Republican has not increased a lot since 2009. In Pew’s own surveys, the proportion of Republicans since 2008 has varied from 24% to 25% (these exact numbers are shown in Kahan’s post). According to Gallup, Republican numbers are tending down, not up, over the last few years. There is thus no reason to think that the proportion of Republicans has gone up. In Pew’s 2009 survey of evolution acceptance, the unweighted proportion of Republicans was 25%, right in line with its other estimates, so there’s no sign that Pew’s evolution acceptance polls underestimate this proportion.

Second, Kahan says independents who “lean Republican” should be counted as Republicans, but that’s not what Pew did, and Kahan’s wishes as to how he would want them counted does not affect Pew’s numbers. Kahan is right that a fuller release of data would be interesting, but no inference of logical inconsistency in the Pew data can be based on this.

And third, Kahan has equated the statistical concept of “the same” with mathematical equality. In algebra, if x + y = z, and you increase y while holding x constant, then the sum, z, must increase. This is in outline form the argument made by Kahan (where x and y represent political subdivisions, and z the overall number). But if x, y, and z are statistically estimated quantities with errors of measurement, then it is possible for x to show no significant change and for y to increase significantly, yet z still show no significant change. This would be especially so if the magnitude of y is small relative to z (and the proportion of Republicans is the smallest of the three main political respondent classes). Thus, there is no contradiction between Democrats and independents being statistically unchanged, Republicans showing a significant change, yet the overall result is also statistically unchanged.

The inference that Kahan tries to make is further undermined by the fact that the overall acceptance of evolution is not the weighted average of just Democrats, independents, and Republicans (where the weights are their estimated proportions in the population), but the weighted average of Democrats, Republicans, independents, other parties, no preference, and refused. There are too many unknowns to be solved for; it’s not x + y = z, but t + u + v + w + x + y = z, and thus knowing just how Democrats (or Democrats+independents) and Republicans have responded is not sufficient to infer the overall response. (I tried figuring out some of these numbers for the 2009 survey from the summarized results by making assumptions to reduce the number of variables, but when I checked my resulting approximations against the actual numbers in the full Pew data set, I was noticeably off.)

So, Kahan is right that it would be useful to have the full data set, but wrong i) that having that full data set would change the apparent embrace of creationism by Republicans; or ii) that it is possible to infer logical inconsistency in the released data. There could be errors in Pew’s calculations of proportions and tests of statistical significance, but that cannot be inferred from the given data.

But is there something nefarious in Pew’s failure to release some of the data, rather than all of it? Kahan clearly thinks there is. He writes:

…this sort of deliberate selectivity (make no mistake, it was deliberate: Pew made the decision to include the partisan breakdown for only half of the bifurcated evolution-belief item) subsidizes the predictable “ha ha ha!” response on the part of the culturally partisan commentators who will see the survey as a chance to stigmatize Republicans as being distinctively “anti-science.” …

Pew lulled those who are making the [“ha ha ha ha ha!”] response into being this unreflective by deliberately (again, they had to decide to report only a portion of the evolution-survey item by political affiliation) failing to report what % of Democrats who indicated that they believe in “naturalistic” evolution. [Democratic results were not selectively withheld; no political breakdown was provided for this question.] …

Right away when I heard about the Pew poll, I turned to the results to see what the explanation was for the interesting — truly! — “shift” in Republican view: Were Republicans changing their positions on creationism or creationists changing their party allegiance?

And right away I ran into this logical inconsistency.

Surely, someone will clear this up, I thought.

But no.

Just the same predictable, boring “ha ha ha ha!” reaction.

Why let something as silly as logic get in the way of an opportunity to pound one’s tribal chest & join in a unifying, polarizing group howl? [All brackets mine– GCM)]

But Kahan’s inference of logical inconsistency cannot be sustained, and thus his speculations as to motive are merely expressions of his own prejudices.

So why didn’t Pew release all the data? Pew’s policy is to release their full data sets a few months after issuing its reports: that’s how I was able to get the full details for the 2009 survey. There may be all sorts of reasons why Pew doesn’t release all its data (most perhaps having to do with the fact that gathering and analyzing such data is most of what they do, and they want first crack at and the chance to publicize their own data before everyone else does), and we won’t be able to check for ourselves to see if Pew made any errors for a few months. But there’s not the slightest hint of error in the released data, and though I don’t know what “tribe” Kahan imagines himself to be a member, if there’s any pounding and howling going on here, it certainly isn’t being done by Pew.

h/t Matthew Cobb

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