You Really Are Know-It-Alls
My, but the people who participated in our latest online experiment were smart. How smart? Nearly twice as smart as the typical California voter.
These cyber-smarties also defied scholarly predictions by knowing more about politics than they did about sports or entertainment, according to the knowledge test sponsored by The Washington Post, Stanford's political communications lab and washingtonpost.com and a companion study by the research firm Polimetrix.
  Even if it tastes bad, we keep eating if the container is big. (By Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post) Social Sciences Survey
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Sign Up for RSS FeedAbout 2,800 people participated in the online quiz. They were asked 20 questions about U.S. politics, international affairs, geography, entertainment and sports. Within each topic they answered two easy and three difficult questions. (An easy question: Who is Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ninety-eight percent knew. Naming the current EPA administrator proved much harder --14 percent correctly identified Stephen L. Johnson.)
Virtually everyone knew celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Angelina Jolie. Sports figures proved difficult. For example, 35 percent could identify the point guard (and league MVP) for the Phoenix Suns, Steve Nash.
Overall, participants were more up-to-date about politics than about soft news -- a surprise, said Shanto Iyengar, director of the political communications lab. That's probably because people more knowledgeable about politics and hard news opted to take our test. As predicted, study participants knew the least about international news.
Iyengar compared these results to identical questions asked last year in a survey of California voters. "Participants in this study were nearly twice as informed as the representative sample of Californians: 88 percent versus 47 percent of the two groups answered the questions correctly," he said.
Detailed findings about this experiment are available at www.washingtonpost.com/richmorin .
Self-Defeating Self-Love
I love myself, I think I'm grand
When I go to the movies
I hold my hand
I put my arm around my waist
And when I get fresh -- I slap my face
