Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Any Conservative Who's Spent More Than 10 Minutes On The Internet Knows That Liberals Are Far More Intolerant Than Conservatives

Pew Research offers some interesting information in one of its recent surveys:
Politics can be a sensitive subject and a number of SNS users have decided to block, unfriend, or hide someone because of their politics or posting activities...Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.
My statistics students took a test today on comparing proportions (28% vs 16%) and should be able to determine that if the proportions were exactly the same, the probability of getting samples with this 12% difference is effectively zero. This result is statistically significant and we therefore conclude that the proportion of liberals who block people or comments with which they disagree (i.e., are intolerant) is demonstrably higher than that of conservatives.

QED.
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4 comments:

  1. mmazenko3:33 PM

    The "he's worse than I am" argument is pretty weak.

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  2. Darren5:20 PM

    "He's more than 50% worse than I am" is a fairly strong argument, though.

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  3. maxutils4:09 PM

    I only block people who leave me farmville or jewel box requests all the time. I'd like to think that's a Libertarian halmark.

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  4. allen (in Michigan)1:19 PM

    Moral superiority means never having to say "I'm sorry". Assuming moral superiority means you've already decided you're never going to say "I'm sorry".

    ReplyDelete