But there are also polls showing that almost half of U.S. adults “support a ban on factory farming.” I think the correct takeaway from those polls is that there’s a gap between vaguely agreeing with an idea when asked vs. actually supporting specific, meaningful policies in a proactive way.
I broadly agree with the conclusion as stated. But I think there are at least a couple of important asymmetries between the factory farming question and the AI question, which mean that we shouldn’t expect there to be a gap of a similar magnitude between stated public support and actual public support regarding AI.
Ending factory farming ban is in direct conflict with most respondents’ (perceived) self-interest in a way that a pause on AI is not (since those respondents willingly continue to consume animal products).
Questions about support for factory farming are more likely to elicit socially desirable responding than questions about the AI pause, since most of those respondents believe factory farming is bad and widely viewed as such, so actively supporting factory farming seems bad. I would expect this to be much less the case regarding AI (we looked into this briefly here and found no evidence of socially desirable responding in either direction).
I think both of these factors conduce to a larger gap between stated attitudes and actual support in the animal farming case. That said, I think this is an ameliorable problem: in our replications of the SI animal farming results, we found substantially lower support (close to 15%).
So, I think the conclusion to draw is that polling certain questions can find misleadingly high support for different issues (even if you ask a well known survey panel to run the questions), but not that very high support found in surveys just generally doesn’t mean anything. [Not that you said this, but I wanted to explain why I don’t think it is the case anyway]
I broadly agree with the conclusion as stated. But I think there are at least a couple of important asymmetries between the factory farming question and the AI question, which mean that we shouldn’t expect there to be a gap of a similar magnitude between stated public support and actual public support regarding AI.
Ending factory farming ban is in direct conflict with most respondents’ (perceived) self-interest in a way that a pause on AI is not (since those respondents willingly continue to consume animal products).
Questions about support for factory farming are more likely to elicit socially desirable responding than questions about the AI pause, since most of those respondents believe factory farming is bad and widely viewed as such, so actively supporting factory farming seems bad. I would expect this to be much less the case regarding AI (we looked into this briefly here and found no evidence of socially desirable responding in either direction).
I think both of these factors conduce to a larger gap between stated attitudes and actual support in the animal farming case. That said, I think this is an ameliorable problem: in our replications of the SI animal farming results, we found substantially lower support (close to 15%).
So, I think the conclusion to draw is that polling certain questions can find misleadingly high support for different issues (even if you ask a well known survey panel to run the questions), but not that very high support found in surveys just generally doesn’t mean anything. [Not that you said this, but I wanted to explain why I don’t think it is the case anyway]