Historically, letting me get bored is a dangerous thing to do, since it usually ends with something on fire, or with one of my legs broken, or possibly some combination of the two. But I’ve gotten a little more sedentary lately (partly because my leg is broken), so I now spend a good bit of my free time playing around on the Internet.
One of my most recent online finds was something called a “News IQ Quiz,” which asked 12 multiple choice questions about current events, ranging from the state of the economy to the progress of the healthcare bill. Most of them were fairly easy; for instance, I only follow the news enough to sound semi-credible when I write these articles, and I managed to answer 11 of them correctly.
But then I made the mistake on clicking on the link to see how the average American performed on this quiz. (I don’t know why I do things like that to myself.) And the results are not pretty: The average American answered 5.3 of these questions correctly. So, we’re talking a little under half.
Now, just to reiterate, this is a multiple-choice quiz. This means it’s possible answer correctly by just guessing. So, hypothetically, if someone trained a cat to randomly click buttons on the quiz, it would most likely get a small handful of questions right. More specifically, from a mathematical standpoint, it would be expected to get 3.4 questions correct, which happens to be better than one out of every four Americans.
But, hey, at least the average American is more informed than the cat. Right? Right?!
Well, yeah. Congratulations, I guess. But there are still a couple of questions where even that is debatable.
For instance, only 26 percent of people could correctly identify (from four choices) the number of votes in the senate necessary to break a filibuster. I don’t want to ruin the answer for anyone who decides to take the quiz, but if you’re curious, you can either read a basic overview of how the Senate works or have been anywhere near a TV when the Massachusetts Senate race was going on earlier this year.
To be fair, while 26 percent is only the tiniest bit better than random guessing, the people on whom the survey data was based did have a fifth option: “I don’t know.” And 37 percent of the people polled went with that option, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since that’s pretty clearly not the correct answer. But it does mean that of the people who thought they knew, the rate of answering correctly jumps to 41 percent. So that’s good, I suppose.
The one trend that absolutely baffled me, though, was the difference in performance based on political affiliation. The results of the study found that, on average, Republicans perform better than Democrats Specifically, they average 5.9 to the Democrats’ 4.9.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against Republicans (with the possible exception of ones who are completely insane). But I find it hard to believe that an entire political party is empirically more informed about the news than another. And the more informed party even has a natural disadvantage, because a lot of its constituents follow Rush Limbaugh.
Yes, one could make the case that the questions might have been biased, or at least an unrepresentative sample of the news at large, but that’s most likely just a Democrat whining about performing worse than a Republican. Or possibly an American whining about performing worse than Random Cat. As far as I can tell, the questions are reasonably balanced and a decent overview of what’s been in the news lately.
So what conclusions can we draw from this? I don’t know. Seriously, I have no earthly idea what to make of the idea that Republicans are more news savvy than Democrats. Maybe a lot of Republican ideology is more well-researched than that of the Democrats, or maybe Republicans find that it’s a lot harder to complain about what Congress is doing if they don’t actually know what Congress is doing. (Though that hasn’t stopped some people.)
So shame on you, Democrats. Go watch the news or something.
As for me, instead of driving myself insane pondering the inexplicable relationship between political affiliation and news consciousness, I’m going to get back to more productive ways to spend my time.
Hey, I wonder if my leg brace is flammable.
McNeill Williford is a senior majoring in industrial engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].
See if you can beat the average American’s score on the “News IQ Quiz” at pewresearch.org/politicalquiz.