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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOlder People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion
Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.
Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did. Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did. And 18-to-29-year-olds performed more than twice as well as the 65+ set. Of the latter group, only 17 percent classified all five facts as factual statements.
On the individual questions, the identification gap was particularly large regarding the nature of the American government and questions about immigration, but there was no statement that younger Americans did not identify with equal or higher accuracy than their elders.
An earlier study by the American Press Institute also found that older Americans were more confident than younger ones in their ability to discern fact from opinion.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/older-people-are-worse-than-young-people-at-telling-fact-from-opinion/573739/
That would explain the appeasl of Trump I guess.
marylandblue
(12,344 posts)saidsimplesimon
(7,888 posts)Crutchez_CuiBono
(7,725 posts)what were we talking about?
saidsimplesimon
(7,888 posts)dameatball
(7,398 posts)marylandblue
(12,344 posts)Mariana
(14,858 posts)Crunchy Frog
(26,587 posts)dameatball
(7,398 posts)Maeve
(42,282 posts)That may be a matter of opinion vs fact!
dameatball
(7,398 posts)Mariana
(14,858 posts)keithbvadu2
(36,829 posts)Good question/observation!
spooky3
(34,460 posts)I didn't see anything in the article about whether the authors controlled for that.
Crunchy Frog
(26,587 posts)Or how exactly does this work?
Mariana
(14,858 posts)However, it may help to explain the fact that in 2016, the majority of voters over 45 cast their ballots for Trump.
dameatball
(7,398 posts)Well, not anymore, but you get the drift.
msongs
(67,420 posts)pstokely
(10,529 posts)the "tv generation"
Ms. Toad
(34,076 posts)So it is frightening to me that at least 80% of individuals 50 or older believed one of the facts was an opinion, and at least 74% identified one opinion as fact. (For individuals under 50, 68% identified one fact as opinion, and 56 identified one opinion as fact).
Only one of the facts has any subjectivity at all (ISIS lost a significant portion of its territory in Iraq and Syria in 2017 - how much territory would ISIS have to lose for the portion to be significant).
None of the opinions can be anything but opinion.
I would have hoped that at least half in each category would get all 10 correct. They're not that hard to distinguish.
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