The number seems to be remarkably close to the percentage of wise and loyal American patriots who support our President (Praise Be Upon Him) at this critical juncture in our nation's history.

Why would 35-50s be the most upset? Well, that's the generation of people that were kids when married women (their mothers) started moving into the workforce in large numbers. For the generation before that, the working mother was an anomaly. For the generation after, it was given.

I think that's a piece of psychic baggage that people of that generation (my own) unfairly project onto women like Hillary. Behind all the Hillary hatred there are some resentful latchkey kids.

Last week, I developed a new theory about the American people, and this supports my theory:

Resolved: For any given topic, 20% of the American Population will hold an insane opinion.

No matter what the issue, there always seems to be about 20% of the people who believe an opinion that is just bat-shit insane.

It doesn't matter the topic: politics, sports, television.

What Wagster said.

My mom said she would not vote for a woman; she's "just not ready for that." I tried to probe deeper , but she didn't want to talk about it.

Hmm. They increased the number of items by 25% and the average number of items that made respondents "angry or upset" increased by ... 26%! Wow, time to read the paper, I guess.

My mom is 72. Yeah, Wagster.

I suspect that there's a Hillary effect. Or maybe a Condi effect. Otherwise, it's hard to see how merely the general proposition of a woman President will make a quarter of the population angry.

It does seem to me that people would react in a different way to a list containing 5 items than a list containing 4. And seeing the extra 5th choice might also change the way people think about the other 4.

Resolved: For any given topic, 20% of the American Population will hold an insane opinion.

27% is the crazification factor

It seems that there is a major flaw in the experimental method - I'm surprised it got through peer-review.

There should have been a control condition with the same number of items as the test condition. The "woman president" results should have been compared to *that* and not a baseline with one fewer item.

For all we know, these results may simply reflect a tendency to select more things when more items are available - sort of a correlate of the tendency to evenly distribute ones SAT answers across all choices, all things being equal.

Hmmm, conditional probabilities. Interpreters beware!

What?

That math ain't right.

The number of items (not people) that made them "angry or upset" increased by 12%.

((2.42-2.16)/2.16)x100=12%

.

I'm more fascinated by the income demographics. What's up with that?

I'm more fascinated by the income demographics. What's up with that?

Yeah, apparently people who make 25,000 to 49,999 dollars are full of hate in general and thus can muster no more disgust for a woman president.

In fact, fewer people could be more upset by the inclusion of the 5 item and the average could go up.

.

The mystery of the 35-to-50s is not so great. Much of their anger was indeed directed at Hillary. Look at any poll, including exit polling; this is easily the most Republican, most GWB-friendly age group. Why? Some say it's because they came of age during the failed Carter presidency and the popular Reagan presidency, but whatever the reason, they turned out quite Republican. And as of two years ago, the only woman with a serious chance at the presidency in the near future was HRC.

To agave: Your math is correct, but for a different question. The question the researchers were asking was this: what percentage of people will respond that they are angry with a woman president? Their working assumption is that a large enough sample population will answer the first four questions more or less in the same proportion, regardless of the existence of that fifth question (questioned by a couple of posters here, but not unreasonable to me), so given that fifth question, we conclude that about one-fourth of the people tested must have had a "yes" answer to the question about the female. The complication for us readers is that the testers didn't just invite people to answer yes or no to a series of questions, but instead to report merely the number of yes answers. Presumably this is a method to allow people to be honest with their prejudices by allowing them to avoid stating them overtly. I find the argument that there must be a "Hillary factor" the most plausible alternative explanation to the more straightforward, namely that a lot of people just don't like the idea of a female president.

Women would say they are angry about a woman president because women are petty, backstabbing, jealous creatures. Being a woman myself, I am not convinced by the sisterhood claims of pro-Hillary people. In the end, women will vote to screw over another woman whom they think is getting more or better than them.

Bob G

OK, but (2.42 - 2.16) x 100 = 26% ?

Oh well math was never my strong suite.

:)

Clever, but I think this is deeply flawed. What I find most suspicious is that the mean number of things that made people angry is so close to half in both cases (2.16 out of 4, and 2.42 out of 5), and the weird ceiling effect (respondents who were already angry about more things had less of an increase when the extra item was added).

Why didn't they do the obvious control? Just try adding two or three other statements that are less controversial and see if the results match.

My gut reaction is that the analytical method is questionable, but I'd need to read the whole thing and think about it to say why. I will say that the assumption that individuals' reactions to the common four items are necessarily the same in both conditions may be faulty -- even those who don't select "female president" as one of their choices may have their reactions to the others colored by its inclusion, or simply by extending the list to five. I bet if they had another condition where the fifth item was something extremely unobjectionable, they'd still see growth. The fact that there's no difference between men and women supports me on this, I think -- even if women had some level of anti-women-presidentness, you'd have to think it would be less than men. (Also, I'm amused that old people are just angry and upset about everything, it seems.)

Usually behind anger you'll find fear.

In general people's authoritarianism tends to fall off as they age. My guess is that explains the cutoff at age 50.

Why the lack before age 30? The targets for Authoritarians do not necessarily remain constant. Perhaps the under 30 authoritarian crowd has not been sufficiently told that women in power should be feared.

Just an idea - it might be something else altogether.

I think there the percent that would not vote for a woman for president is larger than the number that react with anger or upset at a women being president. So I suspect this data suggest the true answer is closer to 45%. If 17% were right, I would expect this result to be 10% or less.

Aaron,

(Also, I'm amused that old people are just angry and upset about everything, it seems.)

I hope it will as amusing to you when you are elderly.

No snark though. In general the elderly are more vulnerable and thus are more fearful. Hence the anger. It is a perfectly understandable reaction to their condition. It explains why they vote more too. They feel they've got more skin in the game.

In general young adults feel no fear because they feel invulnerable. If you are invulnerable why bother with the nasty business of politics? I didn't. Most people dislike politics and avoid it until it really affects them.

The worst would be a traditionalistic college-educated Southerner 30-50 years old making more than $50,000 a year. No surprise there.

I'm not so sure about the study's math, either, but I think the biggest flaw is the premise. I don't believe most people, certainly not as many as 25%, object to a woman as president in principle. Americans tend to be pretty tolerant at the theoretical level. I think that woman-hate is a continuum, and depends primarily on the situation. Senator Clinton's campaign illustrates this very well.

When Senator Clinton announced her campaign, there was no great outpouring of anti-Clinton or anti-female sentiment. Quite the contrary - most of the media, including the blogs, treated it like a cute idea. She was one of many candidates, and that seemed OK, at least in the press and among my acquaintances. During the early, pre-Iowa, debates, Senator Obama made some snarky sexist comments - the claws coming out, etc. - but they were ignored in the media; no one seemed outraged at a snide anti-woman comment, and no one seemed outraged that she was a candidate. That all began to change when Obama won Iowa.

With hindsight, it seems to me that Iowa was where Senator Clinton crossed the line in male sensibility. As long as there was no clear candidate ahead of her, it was OK for a woman to run. But when Senator Obama emerged as a winner, it was no longer OK. The right thing for a woman to do when Prince Charming appears is to step aside gracefully. An ambitious woman who does not step aside is offensive. The sexist rhetoric in the campaign increased a little. Next, however, she won New Hampshire. This established her as not only a woman who could not be trusted to stay in her place, but an outright threat. At that point the campaign rhetoric got really nasty. That's when the Obama campaign played the race card (or the racist card). The charges of Clinton racism were factually not supportable, but it did not matter. The media picked up the racist theme, and ran with it; the pro-Obama blogs began to feature postings with serious Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

It got worse. Next she won Super Tuesday, and proved herself in the CDS mind to be capable of anything - a woman who would do anything at all to win the campaign. The radio and TV crazies and the blogs went ballistic.

Without bringing up every detail, I think it is clear that the degree of woman-hate shown toward Senator Clinton's campaign had little to do with her tactics or character or politics, and a lot to do with how serious a threat she was to a viable male candidate. If no male candidate had emerged as competitive, or if Senator Clinton had run less successfully, I do not believe we would be seeing the hysteria directed against her. In the sexist mind, the goal is not so much to injure women as to control them. A woman safely and visibly under control, or operating within male parameters, is not an object of hate. It's when women start operating with a different set of rules, like the same rules that men accept for themselves, that the hate-reaction sets in.

I'm not so sure about the study's math, either, but I think the biggest flaw is the premise. I don't believe most people, certainly not as many as 25%, object to a woman as president in principle. Americans tend to be pretty tolerant at the theoretical level. I think that woman-hate is a continuum, and depends primarily on the situation. Senator Clinton's campaign illustrates this very well.

When Senator Clinton announced her campaign, there was no great outpouring of anti-Clinton or anti-female sentiment. Quite the contrary - most of the media, including the blogs, treated it like a cute idea. She was one of many candidates, and that seemed OK, at least in the press and among my acquaintances. During the early, pre-Iowa, debates, Senator Obama made some snarky sexist comments - the claws coming out, etc. - but they were ignored in the media; no one seemed outraged at a snide anti-woman comment, and no one seemed outraged that she was a candidate. That all began to change when Obama won Iowa.

With hindsight, it seems to me that Iowa was where Senator Clinton crossed the line in male sensibility. As long as there was no clear candidate ahead of her, it was OK for a woman to run. But when Senator Obama emerged as a winner, it was no longer OK. The right thing for a woman to do when Prince Charming appears is to step aside gracefully. An ambitious woman who does not step aside is offensive. The sexist rhetoric in the campaign increased a little. Next, however, she won New Hampshire. This established her as not only a woman who could not be trusted to stay in her place, but an outright threat. At that point the campaign rhetoric got really nasty. That's when the Obama campaign played the race card (or the racist card). The charges of Clinton racism were factually not supportable, but it did not matter. The media picked up the racist theme, and ran with it; the pro-Obama blogs began to feature postings with serious Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

It got worse. Next she won Super Tuesday, and proved herself in the CDS mind to be capable of anything - a woman who would do anything at all to win the campaign. The radio and TV crazies and the blogs went ballistic.

Without bringing up every detail, I think it is clear that the degree of woman-hate shown toward Senator Clinton's campaign had little to do with her tactics or character or politics, and a lot to do with how serious a threat she was to a viable male candidate. If no male candidate had emerged as competitive, or if Senator Clinton had run less successfully, I do not believe we would be seeing the hysteria directed against her. In the sexist mind, the goal is not so much to injure women as to control them. A woman safely and visibly under control, or operating within male parameters, is not an object of hate. It's when women start operating with a different set of rules, like the same rules that men accept for themselves, that the hate-reaction sets in.

The math here is horrible. Really, really bad. Several of the reasons have been mentioned.

There is no reason to think that you would get the same number of positive answers from a list of five choices than a list of four choices. It is certainly possible that having that fifth choice makes people think about the other four in a different way; before you laugh, remember how important the order of any list is in polling. A much better way to structure this test would be to have six questions, and have equal sample sizes pick from all six possible permutations of the questions. Even then, you wouldn't find out how many people would be angry about having a female president; you would only know how much more angry people are about that than something else that makes some of them angry.

Further, simply subtracting 2.16 from 2.42 is wrong. Finding that there were .26 more positive answers with the woman president question is not the same thing as saying that there are .26 more positive answers because of the specific woman president question, which is not the same thing as saying that 26% of the respondents were angry about the idea of a woman president. I can't think of any justification for doing that. Without asking which questions made people angry, I can't think of a good way to measure this.

A quick skim of the paper did not find any discussion of the confidence interval for their findings. They did do a test that demonstrates conclusively that the mean is higher in the five question test than the four question test. Of course, that doesn't tell us anything. In addition to the problems above, we already knew that there are some people that wouldn't vote for a female candidate, because they will come out and tell you that if you ask them directly.

My suspicion is that, when you look at the confidence intervals for the two tests, you aren't going to find a difference between the two means statistically meaningfully greater than the percentage we already found.

In the end, women will vote to screw over another woman whom they think is getting more or better than them.

And this makes women different than men ... how, exactly?

Brownell, what you're objecting to is the study's conclusion, not its premise. If the study is valid it means that about 25% of the population does not like the idea of having a woman President. The things you said would have made sense somewhere else, maybe, but not here.

Maybe it's just the word "president" that makes people angry.

Brownell,

I don't believe most people, certainly not as many as 25%, object to a woman as president in principle.

Believe what you wish but science says about 25% of Americans believe what their leaders tell them to believe. It is undeniable that fundamentalist Christian religions teach that the man is the head of the household in the same way that Christ is the head of the church. They also teach that the US is a Christian nation and must follow their Christian ideals or face grave peril. It is not a great leap to make from family and church to nation and deduce that God wants a man to lead the country.

You may find it hard to believe that a great number of men and women believe this but read the creeds of their religions and read the planks of the Republican party platform. They don't hide it.

Too many of us have been burying our own heads in the sand while this has been staring us in the face.

Oops. That was me with the mixed face-sand-staring analogy.

AJ is right. The right control condition is missing. Maybe "X serving as president" regardless of X increases the number of options people report as making them angry. We need a separate group of subjects who get a fifth option like "A man serving as president," and compare the degree of increase in this case with the degree of increase in the "A woman serving as president" case.

Brownell,

I should clarify. I think you are making this more complicated than it really was.

A core group of people won't accept a women President but don't need to say that unless it looks like it might happen. It is not as subtle as Clinton taking second to Obama and not quitting. It is simply that these people fear what will happen to America if we have a woman President. Maybe for a smaller group of less authoritarian people Clinton's refusal to not drop out is what set them off but I think the undeniable fact is that 25% or so of the American public have been taught to uncritically believe that a women president would be dangerous for America.

The 30-50 age group doesn't surprise me. I'm right in the middle of it, and as I understand it from previous studies, my immediate age group (people who are 38) is the most conservative alive today. (No wonder I hated high school.)

My poll shows that 97% of people think that 107% of other people are crazy, except for the 37% of those who are only crazy on days of the week ending in "Y".

Looking at the paper, the "listing" technique employed seems to have some history of use by political scientists.

It may be that they have already looked into the issue of whether it really is necessary to use a 5 element list as a baseline in a case like this, to counteract any tendency to select more items if there are more items to select from.

It's actually a pretty clever technique. It'd be interesting to know how well its proper use has been investigated.

It ain't latchkey kids that are upset with their moms.

But there certainly are alot of middle america silver-spoons who know nothing other than their mom raised them they went to college and it's not as easy as they were promised. Why aren't women happy being like their mom was? (Or they are, if women.)

*

Wait for the poll results on those who would be 'angry' if a black were elected president... I'm guessing the numbers will be similar if not a bit higher.

Scandinavia is looking better all the time.

The methodology is interesting, but I see a possible problem. People might tend to answer half of questions with a yes. Certainly it would seem odd to answer yes to all or no to all. A way of addressing my concern would be to compare scores with 3 sets of 5 questions one with the woman president question and 4 others, one with something which doesn't seem likely to make many people angry (say people praying*) and upset and the same 4 others and one which would make almost anyone angry and upset (say needless war**) and the 4 others.

The number of upsetting things with the woman president question minus that with prayer would be a lower bound to the percent upset at the idea of a woman President. One plus the number of upsetting things with woman President minus that with pointless war would be a lower bound (who knows Dick Cheney might be in the sample).

My guess is that the lower number would be well below the upper, not because there are lots of bloodthirsty warmongers out there, but because people would score other questions differently as they anchor at 0. Alternatively, the one extreme question might pull the other answers along as people get the idea that they are supposed to say yes.

No matter how we would love to come up of different scenarios for the votes. Only those who actually have the power to count up the votes will know what everyone decided on. Thats if they are counted right...cough cough florida cough cough

So what does it mean? The arithmetic is simple: (2.42 - 2.16) x 100 = 26%. This means that 26% of the respondents were angered or upset by the notion of a woman serving as president.

Almost exactly the same percentage of the population that still supports the Chimp.

No reaching these mouth-breathers, no matter what you do.

Alright - so nearly half the posts have (correctly) railed agaisnt the flawed, inaccurate, near-silly experimental methods and analyses of this study. And yet, this post is starting to get hyper-linked all over the prog-blog-o-sphere without so much as an editorial comment to this effect.

First, this attests to the numerical illiteracy of the general public. If this is too complicated for even well-educated people (if a BA in Critical Theory counts as well-educated ;) teehee), how can we expect most people to actually understand the science of global-"warming"?

Second, because this little nugget of incorrect info re-inforces what many progs already believe, they're accepting it at face value. While we generally criticize the right-wing for this, it looks like echo-chambers are indeed non-partisan.

I've wondered about this a lot, and indeed many believers of global-warming probably believe it for the wrong reasons - because it accords with their deep-seeded political beliefs and not because of the facts.

This sucks for many many reasons.

What can be done?

(Hey Mr. Drum - you could at least post an Update to this effect)

I doubt many of them got upset specifically about a woman president. I think it probably triggered all the anti-PC outrage that they have programmed into them by Fox and Rush. And then they reacted more negatively to other items already on the list.

Or it may also be a mommy/daddy sort of thing. People get more impatient and angry about things with their mothers. When it comes to dad, they're more likely to "suck it up" because they know he will tolerate it less.

So even if WATB conservatives aren't mad about a woman president, they may be a lot crankier with one around.

I agree with those that suspect this finding is a artifact of the methodology--that is, produced by having five items rather than four. I bet having six items would produce 26% "more" anger. And seven, even more. And so on.

Still, the 27% crazification factor is real. We've seen that figure too many times to doubt that a quarter of the population suffer from some serious disordered thinking.

So, women are bigger sellouts than blacks? Another sociological election from the sociological experiment we're in right now.

the increase is easy to explain: the group of people who had to examine 5 things, as opposed to 4 things, were mad that they had to look at one more thing than that other group.

The oddest finding (I thought) was that the highest level of anger came from the 30-50 age group.

Probably younger people than that are a little more likely to be cooler, because they have been socialized in a newer society and are in the more open-minded, idealistic phase of life.

Probably many people who are older thn 50 are more likely to have some experience to take the edge off at least some of their formerly-held prejudices.

I think the 26% figure shouldn't be taken as a resounding denunciation of a female president, though. As with all things, mistaking the response to the hypothetical or to the abstract for what the response will be in the particular can be a big red herring.

How many people look down on fat people? --unless it's Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh, or Oprah (in one of her fat periods). Ask people to think of a fat person- no particular one, just they're general image of an overweight person who doesn't take care of himself- they may think of a dopey schmuck or a disgusting person, because that's the stereotype we're socialized to have. But in actuality, probably most of us know at least one fat person we like.

Same thing with something like this. It's all easy to say that a quarter of people are enraged by a female president. It's easy to say that a lot of people are racist. But when you put one of these "black Republicans" CNN or whoever get on TV all the time, saying the things they say, all the stodgy conservatives probably hate black people a little less while they're watching them say that stuff. A lot of people may hate the idea of a female president or just have misgivings about it, but when the candidate is someone they think is a really awesome person, they stop thinking of her as "a woman president" and start think just "Hillary" or whoever it may be.

"The oddest finding (I thought) was that the highest level of anger came from the 30-50 age group."

This is really simple and straightforward. That age group consists of Generation X and the later Baby Boomers, which are the age cohort with the highest percentage of Republicans. Even in early 2006, it was pretty obvious that the hypothetical "Woman President" would be a Democrat, and would probably be Hillary Clinton.

Just more incentive to vote for the rich white Republican male. Safe, on so many levels.

Fascinating methodology... People lie on surveys all the time for whatever reason but it's nice to see someone who knows how to trick them into telling the truth.

PTate,

Still, the 27% crazification factor is real. We've seen that figure too many times to doubt that a quarter of the population suffer from some serious disordered thinking.

And class, what is the proper name for these people? Anyone? I know at least some of you were listening. I've got a cookie for the first to answer correctly.

I am not surprised at all by this. I hear this everyday, and in no way connected to Hillary Clinton. In the past week alone I must have heard the expression "I'll be [darned] if I am going to lose to a woman" three or four times. One week. Privately, on TV, on radio. I hear this every week. Of course, what has happened to Clinton has been so obvious and so angering to people opposed to sexism, that it is now a front and center issue. As a Clinton supporter, I agree that there can be many reasons to oppose her candidacy, and there are many people who in good faith oppose her for one reason or another. But the sheer quantity of criticism directed at her that involves negative remarks about her sex, or the criticisms of her that you would never hear about a man, simply cannot be ignored (well...actually it can be and is frequently ignored). When this seriously racist culture would prefer in general a black man to a white woman as president (several polls have shown this and not recently), that speaks volumes to the depth and entrenched nature of sexism in our culture. It runs very deep and transcends all racial or other classifications. But the clincher is that I hear very very little in the way of racist statements from people in the past few years, but the level of sexist anti-women-just-because-they-are-women comments from people in private, in public, and in the media, shows no signs of diminishing at all. In fact, in our increasingly coarsened culture I hear ever more of it all the time.

Thank God we are likely to break the color barrier to the White House this time around. At least we can make some progress on one front. I doubt very much that I will live to see a woman president in the US, and that will be very sad indeed.

Jammer,

My daughter will be eligible to be President in 2024. I'm hoping to live long enough to see that. That way if I do go "down" instead of "up" it will be frozen over.

This experimental design makes me angry.

I just can't figure out which demographic group I should take it out on.

That makes me REALLY angry!

Math incredibly broken here.

The correct calculation is:

(2.46 - 2.16)/5 = 5.2%

There were 5 questions, not 1.

Thank God we are likely to break the color barrier to the White House this time around. At least we can make some progress on one front.

For me, a white woman, the U.S. finally breaking the color barrier to the White House isn't an "at least"--it's just as big a deal and every bit as worthy of celebration as electing the first woman president will be.

It's really made me sad to find out how many white women, especially older white women, don't seem to think so. I am continually amazed at the inability of some members of marginalized demographic groups to identify with the plight--or even acknowledge the reality of the situation--of similarly underrepresented groups. This primary season has provided an astonishingly widespread example of that. It's been disheartening to say the least.