Thanks for doing this work, and making it public. Similar to Max, I basically believe in the Total View, and am sympathetic to Temporal Cosmopolitanism, so consider this somewhat good news.
However, I am a little skeptical about some of the questions. To the extent you are trying to get at what people ‘really’ think (if they have real views on such a topic...) I worry that some of questions were phrased in a somewhat biased matter—particularly the ones asking for agreement with the text.
When doing political polling, people generally don’t ask questions like this:
Do you agree the government should spend more on law and order?
… because people’s level of agreement will be exaggerated. Instead, it’s often considered better practice to say phrase it more like:
Which Statement do you agree with more?
1) The government should spend more on law and order, even if it means higher taxes.
2) The government should lower taxes, even if it means less spending on law and order.
Agreed. As I mentioned in this comment, people will tend to be inclined to agree with any generally positive sounding platitude, due to acquiescence bias and plausibly social desirability bias. On the whole, I would expect people to be extremely reluctant to explicitly deny that some people “matter just as much as” as others if the affirmative is put to them. This all may especially be a problem when the issues in question are ones people haven’t really thought about before and so don’t have clear attitudes- this will be particularly likely to elicit just superficial agreement.
I think one of the best approaches to ameliorate this is to use reversed statements i.e. ask people whether they agree with an item expressing the opposite attitude (i.e. that people who are alive here and now matter more). Sanjay should be posting a report of the results when we did this fairly soon. Quite often you will find that people will agree with statements expressing both an attitude and a statement designed to capture the exact opposite view, and you then need to work to find a set of items that together actually seems to meaningfully capture the attitude of interest.
Thanks for the suggestion to use reversed statements. As I said in my response to Larks, I share this concern, so if we run further iterations of the survey, I’ll include something along these lines.
Thanks for this. I basically share the concern that you and David express, and it would be good to revise the statements accordingly if we run further versions of the survey. But even if the extent of agreement is inflated, it seems reasonable to think that the ordinal ranking should remain the same (so that people agree more strongly with the first text than the second, and believe more strongly that people on the other side of the planet matter just as much than that those in the distant future do).
Thanks for doing this work, and making it public. Similar to Max, I basically believe in the Total View, and am sympathetic to Temporal Cosmopolitanism, so consider this somewhat good news.
However, I am a little skeptical about some of the questions. To the extent you are trying to get at what people ‘really’ think (if they have real views on such a topic...) I worry that some of questions were phrased in a somewhat biased matter—particularly the ones asking for agreement with the text.
When doing political polling, people generally don’t ask questions like this:
… because people’s level of agreement will be exaggerated. Instead, it’s often considered better practice to say phrase it more like:
Agreed. As I mentioned in this comment, people will tend to be inclined to agree with any generally positive sounding platitude, due to acquiescence bias and plausibly social desirability bias. On the whole, I would expect people to be extremely reluctant to explicitly deny that some people “matter just as much as” as others if the affirmative is put to them. This all may especially be a problem when the issues in question are ones people haven’t really thought about before and so don’t have clear attitudes- this will be particularly likely to elicit just superficial agreement.
I think one of the best approaches to ameliorate this is to use reversed statements i.e. ask people whether they agree with an item expressing the opposite attitude (i.e. that people who are alive here and now matter more). Sanjay should be posting a report of the results when we did this fairly soon. Quite often you will find that people will agree with statements expressing both an attitude and a statement designed to capture the exact opposite view, and you then need to work to find a set of items that together actually seems to meaningfully capture the attitude of interest.
Thanks for the suggestion to use reversed statements. As I said in my response to Larks, I share this concern, so if we run further iterations of the survey, I’ll include something along these lines.
I look forward to seeing Sanjay’s report!
Thanks for this. I basically share the concern that you and David express, and it would be good to revise the statements accordingly if we run further versions of the survey. But even if the extent of agreement is inflated, it seems reasonable to think that the ordinal ranking should remain the same (so that people agree more strongly with the first text than the second, and believe more strongly that people on the other side of the planet matter just as much than that those in the distant future do).