I would expect the item “People in the distant future matter just as much as those alive today” to produce somewhat inflated levels of agreement. One reason is that I expect that any formulation along the lines of “X people matter just as much as Y people” will encourage agreement, because people don’t want to be seen as explicitly saying that any people matter less than others and agreement seems pretty clearly to be the socially desirable option. Another is that acquiescence bias will increase agreement levels, particularly where the proposition is one that people haven’t really considered before and/or don’t have clearly defined attitudes towards.
Me and Sanjay found pretty different results to this and, as I think he mentioned, we’ll be sharing a writeup of the results soon.
(And agree that this would produce inflated levels of agreement, but feel like “do you endorse this statement?” is the relevant criterion for a definition even if that endorsement is inflated relative to action).
Hi Will,
I would expect the item “People in the distant future matter just as much as those alive today” to produce somewhat inflated levels of agreement. One reason is that I expect that any formulation along the lines of “X people matter just as much as Y people” will encourage agreement, because people don’t want to be seen as explicitly saying that any people matter less than others and agreement seems pretty clearly to be the socially desirable option. Another is that acquiescence bias will increase agreement levels, particularly where the proposition is one that people haven’t really considered before and/or don’t have clearly defined attitudes towards.
Me and Sanjay found pretty different results to this and, as I think he mentioned, we’ll be sharing a writeup of the results soon.
Interesting! Can’t wait. :)
(And agree that this would produce inflated levels of agreement, but feel like “do you endorse this statement?” is the relevant criterion for a definition even if that endorsement is inflated relative to action).