{"id":39494,"date":"2013-06-06T08:27:25","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T07:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/are-conservatives-easier-to-manipulate\/39494\/"},"modified":"2013-06-06T08:27:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T07:27:25","slug":"are-conservatives-easier-to-manipulate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/are-conservatives-easier-to-manipulate\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Conservatives Easier to Manipulate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 5, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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A Gallup Poll <\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0on May 29 strikingly titled \u201cU.S. Support for Euthanasia Hinges on How It\u2019s Described\u201d contains unambiguous new evidence that Republicans are more manipulable than Democrats\u2013at least when the question concerns the important issue of whether or not a terminal patient\u2019s request for assistance to die should be carried out by the person\u2019s doctor. It reported that, \u201cA May 2-7 Gallup survey finds 70% of Americans in favor of allowing doctors to hasten a terminally ill patient\u2019s death when the matter is described as allowing doctors to \u2018end the patient\u2019s life by some painless means.\u2019 At the same time, far fewer \u2014 51% \u2014 support it when the process is described as doctors helping a patient \u2018commit suicide.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

The precise question in the latter instance was \u201cWhen a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, do you think doctors should or should not be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it?\u201d <\/p>\n

The remarkable finding was that 71% of Democrats, and 68% of Republicans, support a doctor\u2019s ending a patient\u2019s life by some painless means if the patient requests it and has a terminal illness, but only 60% of Democrats, and 41% of Republicans do when the question it phrased as \u201cto assist the patient to commit suicide.\u201d <\/p>\n

That\u2019s a fall-off from 71% down to 60% for Democrats \u2014 or a reduction of 15% \u2014 of Democrats, who can be manipulated by using different terminology; but it\u2019s a fall-off from 68% down to 41% for Republicans \u2014 or a reduction of 40% \u2014 of Republicans, who can be manipulated by a mere synonymous rephrasing of the same question. <\/p>\n

Or, to put that in the other way, based upon this poll, 85% of Democrats, versus only 60% of Republicans, were not<\/i>\u00a0manipulable on this issue \u2014 they responded to the issue itself, and not to the wording of it. <\/p>\n

There is a vast amount of other empirical evidence showing that conservatives, and Republicans in particular, are more manipulable than non-conservatives. <\/p>\n

A famous study by Jost, Glaser, Kruglansky and Sulloway, \u201cPolitical Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,\u201d in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin <\/i>, found that prejudices were even stronger among conservatives than among the general population. <\/p>\n

An October 2003 survey, \u201cMisperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,\u201d from worldpublicopinion.org<\/a>\u00a0(formerly \u201cPIPA,\u201d or Program on International Policy Attitudes) found that the audience of Fox News is highly Republican, but failed to provide any detailed breakdown. A more detailed study of this question, issued by rasmussenreports.com<\/a> in June 2004, was headlined \u201cFox Fans Favor Bush 65% to 28%,\u201d and noted, by way of contrast, that \u201cCNN Fans Favor Kerry 63% to 26%.\u201d <\/p>\n

Furthermore, this survey found that, \u201cIn the race for Congress, Fox fans will vote for GOP candidates by a 56% to 25% margin. The CNN audience will vote Democratic by a 54% to 27% margin.\u201d The PIPA study of \u201cMisperceptions\u201d and \u201cthe Iraq War\u201d found: \u201cThe extent of Americans\u2019 misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.\u201d <\/p>\n

On\u00a0November 22, <\/span><\/span> 2011, thinkprogress.org<\/a>\u00a0headlined \u201cFox News Viewers Are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It,\u201d and Chris Mooney linked to each of the seven different studies that had been done of this subject, all of which found the same thing. The latest study was titled \u201cClimate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News [FNC], CNN, and MSNBC.\u201d This latest study closed by saying: \u201cIn sum, the results overwhelmingly support Hypothesis 4 [that FNC viewers rejected the reality of global warming, whereas CNN\/MSNBC viewers accepted its reality], demonstrating that Fox News viewing is associated with lower levels of global warming acceptance, with the reverse true for CNN\/MSNBC viewing. … [Moreover, a separate finding was:] The views of Republicans seem to reflect the cable news outlet they watch, regardless of whether it is Fox or CNN\/MSNBC. Democrats, on the other hand, do not vary significantly in their global warming beliefs as a function of cable news.\u201d <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 5, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. A Gallup Poll \u00a0on May 29 strikingly titled \u201cU.S. Support for Euthanasia Hinges on How It\u2019s Described\u201d contains unambiguous new evidence that Republicans are more manipulable than Democrats\u2013at least when the question concerns the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}