There is an interesting article in the July 15, 2024 TIME titled “The polarization Myth”. The gist of the article is that we, in the United States, are not as polarized as we think.
The article starts out with some data on attitudes about climate change. In January 2021, a former professor did a survey of 2000 people to find out, essentially, what kind of country they want. Each person was presented with 55 separate goal statements for the nation and asked to rank them in order of importance. Each person was also asked how each goal would be ranked by “other people”.
When the results were tallied, it was not a surprise that “People have individual rights” came in first or that “People have high-quality health care” was second. It was surprising that the third priority (out of 55) was “Successfully address climate change”.
On the other hand, in the list of how “other people” rank the 55 goal statements, “successfully address climate change” was 33rd.
In other words, people think that successfully addressing climate change is very important but they think that others don’t place much importance on that goal. We think we are polarized (when it comes to views on climate change) but there is a high degree of consensus!
Note: the researcher is Todd Rose. He founded a think tank called Populace and the study is called the American Aspirations Index.
Note: I only summarized the first page or so of the article.
