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.
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Exp:
Your title is an opinion, as the article references only a single study in the USA. Or, to be more precise, you have presented a weakly-supported hypothesis.
Codger.
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Your title is an opinion, as the article references only a single study in the USA. Or, to be more precise, you have presented a weakly-supported hypothesis.
I've noticed from my Facebook feed that older generations and self-identified conservative friends overwhelmingly tend to share posts, information, or web news stories that are objectively false or espouse an opinion as fact. False dichotomies/dilemmas are their favorite flavor of fallacy.
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pfft, I know plenty of younger people that do the same thing. In fact if you look at the whole conspiracy theory phenomenon, the majority of the faces that you see are under 50.
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I've noticed from my Facebook feed that older generations and self-identified conservative friends overwhelmingly tend to share posts, information, or web news stories that are objectively false or espouse an opinion as fact. False dichotomies/dilemmas are their favorite flavor of fallacy.
I’ve noticed this as well. And it isn’t linked to reposts to the left or right. A lot of my more seasoned friends and relatives do this.
Even when the posts are from the spectrum where I want to believe them, you can discredit them after a cursory glance.
Not to worry though, like a fine wine, I’m heading that way myself.
Missing from the study: statements that are neither facts nor opinions. I'd wager that old people have a harder time spotting those as well.
What’s an example of something that isn’t a fact or an opinion?
I think the other thing that would be interesting in the poll wild have been to depoliticize it and include false facts
For example
A Zebra is a type of cat is a false factual statements
Vs
Zebras are the best type of cat is an opinion.
In doing the poll this way you could indentify what is just a failing of old
People to indentify statements of fact vs people’s opinion of the fact.
Is the problem that they can’t identify the structure of a factual statement or that when faced with a factual statement that they disagree with argument that the fact suppprts they don’t believe it to be factual.
Pew also put more facts and opinions that are right wing totems rather than more neutral items like Vaccines do not cause autism
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Given the political slant of the questions that were asked, I wonder if the results have something to do with older people being more conservative, and therefore less likely to accept the factual statements as factual owing to their political beliefs and motivated reasoning.
For example, had the factual statements been things like "On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was duly elected president of the United States", or "Millions of immigrants in the United States today are here illegally", or "A fetus has the ability to feel pain during the second trimester of pregnancy", I wonder what the results would have been.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
What’s an example of something that isn’t a fact or an opinion?
I think the other thing that would be interesting in the poll wild have been to depoliticize it and include false facts
For example
A Zebra is a type of cat is a false factual statements
Vs
Zebras are the best type of cat is an opinion.
Basically this. If the actual intent of the study was to determine who is better at sorting fact from opinion, you'd expect the questions to be totally inane and not politically charged at all.
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The older you are, the worse you are at identifying facts from opinions
