Fox News is Just So ... Special

I'm working on a follow-up study to my earlier one on who thinks Barack Obama is Muslim.  I won't bore you with the details, but as part of the analysis I'm looking at a host of ways people get the news, down to specific sources.

So far, out of 18 ways to get news and information, only one stands out as resulting in a greater likelihood people think Obama is Muslim.

Yup, you guessed it.  Watching Fox News.

Watching Fox, in this early look at the numbers, makes you nearly twice as likely to say he's a Muslim.
 
And here's the wow factor.  Even if I statistically control for stuff like a respondent's racism score, education, race, living in the South, and political interest (just a few I tossed in quickly) -- watching Fox News still makes you more likely to perceive Obama is Muslim.

It's the only one that does this.

A bunch of them have no relationship at all with perceptions of Obama being Muslim (the major broadcast networks, listening to Rush Limbaugh (surprise!), getting news via social media like Twitter or Facebook.  A few reduce the likelihood of thinking Obama is Muslim (watching Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, CNN, MSNBC, or reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times).

This is a first blush of data that'll require deeper analysis, but I was so surprised -- okay not really surprised -- by only one network showing up, figured I had to share.

The Donald's Birthing Exercise

Yesterday I wrote, like so many others, about Donald Trump's birthing exercise.  You know the one, whether Barack Obama was born in the U.S. (yes, he was, if you consider Hawaii in the U.S.).  You can go to the previous post for details.  But I noticed today a new poll is out on the issue, the one finding a higher percentage of those who doubt Obama's U.S. citizenship.  First, a caveat -- it's a Fox News poll -- but let's assume the best.  According to the poll, 24 percent of Americans say Obama was not born in the U.S.

That's one-in-four of American adults doubting Obama's citizenship and, by extension, the constitutionality of his presidency. About two-thirds say Obama is a citizen.  Ten percent are unsure.

It goes without saying, though I'll say it, that Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or Independents to believe Obama was born elsewhere (37 percent).  They're also a lot more likely to be unsure (16 percent).  In other words, if you add the "elsewhere" and "unsure" groups together, you get well over half of Republicans (53 percent) doubting Obama was born in the U.S.  That qualifies as a wow as we gear up for the 2012 election cycle.

Clearly the significant difference seen between Republicans and either Democrats or Independents can be explained through motivational reasoning.  Simply put, we tend to believe what we want to believe -- and we will discount that which doesn't fit our predispositions.  Partisanship, it seems, wins out over accuracy.  A lot of this is subconscious and I used the theory in some published research to explain why people believe Obama is Muslim despite all evidence to the contrary.  And here's the twist ... corrections by the media of some mistake actually push the most partisan to even more strongly cling to inaccurate beliefs.  In other words, with some folks, you just can't win.

So often, instead of what people know, we should ask: what people prefer to know.

Racism and the Perception Obama is a Muslim

I've published earlier research on perceptions that President Barack Obama is Muslim.  In that study, I was specifically interested in whether exposure to news moderated this misperception (it didn't).  The least educated, least politically interested, and those with strong conservative Christian beliefs were most likely to perceive Obama as Muslim.

Okay, fine.  But what about racism?

A couple of people have suggested that since discussing his race was politically incorrect, a taboo of sorts, the myth of him being Muslim became a surrogate for those with racist beliefs.  But no one's tested this yet with actual data.  Until now.

In a first blush, I looked at two different kinds of racism.  The first is explicit racism, a traditional measure based on questions such as do you feel admiration toward blacks?  I created a scale based on these.  The second is implicit racism, and it's a bit more complicated.  Respondents were asked to focus on a screen and then, for 250 milliseconds (below conscious level) they saw a random black face, and then it was instantly replaced by a Chinese letter (ideograph).  At that point they were prompted to quickly click on the letter as being pleasant or unpleasant.  They did this for 24 faces.  This is an approach used for years in other areas and even in attitudes toward Obama -- but not about perceptions of his religious affiliation.  My N (number of respondents) is about 980 ... real people, not college students.

Okay, so we have two measures of racism.  I put them into a model to statistically control for education, age, race, party identification, and so on, to see if racism still predicted the likelihood to see Obama as Muslim.

I fully anticipated that implicit racism would remain statistically significant, being a sneakier measure of racism.  I was wrong.  Only explicit racism continued to predict the perception that Obama is Muslim.  There are two possibilities.  First, I may have screwed up creating my explicit racism measure.  I've triple checked, but it's a complicated bit of recoding given the number of images, their randomized order, and so on.  The other is that the measure simply doesn't work.  That seems unlikely.  It's an approach, called AMP, that's been around for a while and worked well in this study of Obama.  Or maybe I need to think deeper about differs between these two measures.

Regardless, it's fascinating that explicit racism remains a factor even after controlling for a large number other, more likely, explanations.  That may be enough to build a journal article around, though I'm not so sure.  Any thoughts are appreciated.

Knowing False Things

Thanks to colleague Karen Russell for pointing this list of eight false things the public "knows" prior to the election.  It is, of course, a list designed to reinforce the job the Obama Administration has done over the past two years, just before the GOP eats the Dem's lunch.

If you did deep enough in the comments you'll find challenges to some, but not all, of Dave Johnson's points. But even if half of his list are "false" things people believe about the economy and such are correct, that says a lot about what people perceive as true versus what is actually true.

Ironically, in about two hours I'm giving a lecture to 25 or so Honors students about more or less the same topic -- how being uninformed is conceptually, theoretically, and pragmatically different than being misinformed.  I'll be using the myth that Obama is Muslim as my anchor.  Unfortunately I have a really sore throat, so I'm gonna swallow several Tylenol beforehand.  And if that doesn't work, I'll use interpretative dance instead.

Perceived and Actual Knowledge

There's what people know, and what people think they know.  In this piece, Nicole Skibola in a Forbes blog notes:

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discusses how disconnects between status and knowledge often lead to inefficient outcomes in decision-making processes. Groups, and obviously business organizations, tend to give deference to individuals with perceived or actual status, often with little to no correlation with actual knowledge.  As the group coalesces around one perceived knowledge holder, minorities are less likely to share their own perspectives, despite the fact that minority opinions make groups wiser as a whole.

Think of it as a micro version of the spiral of silence in which minority viewpoints tend to spiral into, yes, silence, because the majority speaks up so much, and so loudly, and our fear of isolation is such that we don't dare speak out.

I should point out that, despite what the book suggests, actual and perceived knowledge are typically correlated with one another.  Not perfectly, mind you, but there is a tendency for those who know something to also believe they know something.  I note the imperfection of the relationship because I've been reading a study on misinformation and how confident people are in their completely irrational beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama is Muslim.  The more misinformed, some studies suggest, the more confident people are in that misinformed belief.  In other words, it's damn hard to shake someone loose from crazy beliefs, even with facts.

Being uninformed, and being misinformed, are two conceptually distinct matters.  More on this another time.

What's Up with Texas?

Twenty-nine percent of Texans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, according to this survey.

This is a tired subject.  And yet fascinating.  And sad.  And I'm not going to talk about this any more because, c'mon people, how dumb can you be?

Obama Apparently Still a MuslimExcept, of course, he's not

A new Pew survey shows that a core group of uninformed Americans believe President Obama is Muslim.

I've written at length on this topic.  An example blog post is here, I've also published research from a panel of folks during the 2008 campaign, work that appeared recently in the Journal of Media and Religion.  Hell, I've even been quoted in The New York Times about my research.  So yeah, I'm interested and somewhat knowledgeable on the topic.  See the graphic from Pew on the left.

Why is the misperception that Obama is Muslim apparently growing?  Andy Kohut of the Pew Center gave a clear explanation this morning on NPR.  In part, the "don't knows" continue to grow, perhaps because Obama does not make a big deal about his Christian beliefs, particularly compared to George W. Bush who did.  I'd also add that politics, wanting to believe "the worst" about a politician you already don't like, also play a part.  Yeah, GOPers are a lot more likely to think he's Muslim, so that suggests a political explanation.  My own research also found conservative Christians (who also happen to be Republicans) are a major factor here.

All in all, a depressing and interesting survey result.  I'd write more but I have class soon, but perhaps I'll do a follow-up posting later today.