Partisan Bias and the Bayesian Ideal in the Study of Public Opinion
نویسنده
چکیده
Bayes’ Theorem is increasingly used as a benchmark against which to judge the quality of citizens’ thinking, but some of its implications are not well understood. A common claim is that Bayesians must agree more as they learn and that the failure of partisans to do the same is evidence of bias in their responses to new information. Formal inspection of Bayesian learning models shows that this is a misunderstanding. Learning need not create agreement among Bayesians. Disagreement among partisans is never clear evidence of bias. And although most partisans are not Bayesians, their reactions to new information are surprisingly consistent with the ideal of Bayesian rationality.
منابع مشابه
The Polarization of Public Opinion about Competence
The existing literature on polarization has focused predominantly on spatial polarization and partisanship. This paper extends the focus of polarization to the literature on issue ownership, and competence. Using ANES data from 1972 to 2012, we identify a pattern of partisan polarization in competence assessments in parallel with elite polarization in the US and some evidence of increasing comp...
متن کاملSocial Desirability Bias in Measures of Partisanship
Scholars have long suggested that as a particular view or perspective becomes the social norm, we run the risk of overestimating the prevalence of this perspective due to social desirability bias. In this manuscript we address this possibility of this effect in one of the most fundamental measures in American politics: the measure of partisanship. In particular, we argue that social desirabilit...
متن کاملThe modeling of body's immune system using Bayesian Networks
In this paper, the urinary infection, that is a common symptom of the decline of the immune system, is discussed based on the well-known algorithms in machine learning, such as Bayesian networks in both Markov and tree structures. A large scale sampling has been executed to evaluate the performance of Bayesian network algorithm. A number of 4052 samples wereobtained from the database of the Tak...
متن کاملProviding A Model for Management Earnings Forecast Bias
Despite The Important Role That Management Profit Forecasting Plays In The Decision Making Of Capital Market Actors, These Predictions Appear To Be Biased. In The Attempt To Measure The Bias Of Predicting Profit Management, Numerous One- Dimensional Measurement Tools Have Been Proposed In The Accounting And Finance Literature. Despite These Efforts, No Comprehensive Composite Index Has Been Dev...
متن کاملThe Impact of Individual Biases on Consensus Formation
Social groups of interacting agents display an ability to coordinate in the absence of a central authority, a phenomenon that has been recently amplified by the widespread availability of social networking technologies. Models of opinion formation in a population of agents have proven a very useful tool to investigate these phenomena that arise independently of the heterogeneities across indivi...
متن کامل