Making it up as you go along

Abstract

In a simple but inspired experiment, George Bishop and his colleagues at the University of Cincinnati began a survey with questions about the local congressman. This was bound to prove embarrassing to respondents, since fewer than half typically know the name of their representative, and even fewer have any real information beyond this. One of the questions read: Is there any legislative bill that has come up in the House of Representatives, on which you remember how your congressman has voted in the last couple of years? ( if yes ) What was that? Only 12 percent could think of anything. Following this, respondents were asked to describe their level of interest in politics. Altogether, 45 percent said they follow politics “only now and then” or “hardly at all,” which was one of the lowest reported levels of political interest ever recorded in a general population survey in the United States. Meanwhile, another group of respondents to the poll was asked their level of interest in politics without first having to suffer through the difficult questions about their congressman. In this group, only half as many – 22 percent – indicated low levels of interest in politics. The lesson in this experiment is wonderfully capsulized in the title to the article describing the experiment: “What must my interest in politics be if I just told you ‘I don't know’?” (Bishop, Oldendick, and Tuchfarber, 1984).