Political stereotypes

Description

Affiliation with political parties can link to personal attribute stereotypes, some statistically accurate and some not. We are doing a pilot study to see how people assess the political affiliations of others based simply on vignettes of these others. Given a few personal attributes about a fictional individual, we are hoping to gain an inside view of how others weigh these pieces of information and combine them together to figure out another piece of information about the same individual. Mainly, we will be interested in finding out what information is used to judge whether a person considers him/herself to be a Democrat or a Republican.

People

• Principal investigator: Andrew Gelman
• Researchers: Matt Salganik, Sharad Goel, Juli Simon Thomas

Data

Purple America web site: http://www.purpleamerica.org

Data for this project will be gathered using the game on this web site.

Funding

Andrew Gelman's NSF grant with Tian Zheng, Tom DiPrete, and Julien Teitler: Using "How many X's do you know" surveys to study social and political polarization.