The fact that people oppose Obama's health care reform may not necessarily be rooted in their conservative ideology or fear of government. They may not like what they see (I certainly do not like the watered down version of the public option, I think we would be better off without it) or they may be exhibiting the "endowment effect" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect i.e. value what they have than what they do not. But that is hardly unique to the US - EU experiences this big time.
While we are at that, I do not think that most people have any ideology in a political sense of the word - they have "stock knowledge" that frames their perceptions of opinions and political ideologies. It just happens that the right wingers are so much better than the left wingers to link their ideology to the stock knowledge prevailing in the US society.
Besides, if the pollsters know that opinion polls suck, why do we have so many of them?
Wojtek
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 25, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> From a cognitive point of view, polls created thier own answers by
>> imposing
>> a particular interpretative framework on the comunicative interaction. It
>> goes well beyond mere wording of questions, and involves social status and
>> personalities of the interviewers and respondents, social context where
>> the
>> interview takes place, e.g. whether it is a telephone or face to face
>> interview, who else is present in the room with the responded, what was
>> the
>> respondent doing prior to the interview, and so on. The idea that one can
>> measure the contetns of the human mind with a paper and pencil test is
>> probably one of the biggest science-defying fallacies in out times.
>>
>
> Pollsters know all this, you know. One of the reasons you know it, in fact,
> is that they've tested precisely these things.
>
> Doug
>
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