This is a follow-up to “my post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/08/why_do_more_people_think_obama.html on how better-educated Republicans are driving the perception that Obama is a Muslim. David Smith kindly sent me “this paper”:http://ussc.edu.au/s/media/docs/publications/1005_Smith_Obama.pdf (pdf), which argues:
bq. This paper uses data from the 2008 ANES panel study to explore the surprisingly widespread belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim. I examine two main causal mechanisms: anti-Obama predispositions caused by Republican Party ID and implicit racial bias, which would have created a good pre-existing “fit” for belief in the Muslim rumor, and lack of political knowledge, which would have increased the Muslim rumor’s plausibility. I find that both mechanisms were prevalent and interacted with each other.
There are some interesting findings when you look within subgroups. Smith’s results show that the perception that Obama is a Muslim is most prevalent among Republicans and racially prejudiced Democrats and independents. (There is no effect of racial prejudice among Republicans.) Comfortingly, people who pay more attention to politics, regardless of their party identification, are less likely to have this misperception — but simply paying attention to politics does not appear to remove the partisan bias. Smith also shows that this misperception was associated with a lower propensity to vote for Obama among Democrats, independents, and the politically inattentive, although of course very few Democrats actually voted for McCain and one can legitimately ask whether perceptions of Obama’s religion are more a consequence than a cause of how people voted.
The overall lesson, and one I will explore in a subsequent post, continues to be how much attitudes — toward parties, toward racial groups — affect our perceptions of facts.