What weird unexpected things will correlate with being a conservative in my planned omnibus correlational survey?
➕
Plus
161
Ṁ26k
Feb 26
84%
Dislike ambiguous endings in movies
77%
Preference for dogs over cats
73%
Orders steak 'well done' (as opposed 'medium rare' or 'rare' etc)
71%
Needs to identify with the protagonist to enjoy a book or movie
62%
Refers to penis as "baby-maker"
61%
Dislike sour candy
59%
"On a scale from 0-10, how much do you enjoy physical pain caused by exercise?" (0 = I hate it; 10 = I love it)
57%
Prefers team sports over solo sports
55%
Has a job that involves high tacit knowledge (per Polanyi’s definition)
53%
Cares less about expiration dates on foodstuff
50%
Ferroequinology
50%
Refers to breasts as "the Devil's dirty pillows".
50%
Refers to marijuana as "the Devil's lettuce".
50%
Worse knowledge of the beatitudes (among the religious)
47%
Being right-handed
43%
Collects mass-produced things (angel figurines, replicas, etc.)
42%
Would rather time-travel to the 1980s for two weeks than the 1970s or the 1990s
41%
Better at stump cussin' (saving up and listing all the disagreeable features of an oponent)
41%
Concern over "proper" orientation of toilet paper roll.
38%
How much does it bother you to wear odd socks?

If you add interesting answers, they will then be included in the survey. The purpose of this market is to get tips on unexpected things that might correlate with conservatism. If you add uninteresting things or things that are already shown by a lot of research to correlate with conservatism, I may remove them at my discretion.

I will be running a big survey on things that correlate with political attitudes, especially conservatism. If a variable has a statistically significant correlation in the sample with self-rated conservatism, it will resolve yes.

I reserve the right to add controls as I see fit when testing the hypotheses. I will use my own common sense about what kind of controls are appropriate for what kinds of hypotheses, based on whether the correlation is still theoretically interesting without the control structure. My common sense might be different to yours. You have been warned.

Get
Ṁ1,000
and
S3.00
Sort by:

A few questions:

  • Is this just positive correlations or negative too?

  • Which statistical significance test will you use?

  • Would you consider normalizing your significance threshold so that a fixed fraction, maybe half, of the submitted options do or don't pass, so that they're not either all yes or all no?

  • Do options that don't get used in the survey, and options that have all non-troll respondents answering the same, resolve no or n/a?

@kevor Actually, this was touched upon in an episode of "King of the Hill".

"A man should keep his baby maker in his pants, unless he's going to make a baby."; "Thank goodness, I've only had to touch my husband's baby maker twice since we got married. "

Goes along with belief that a numbered, bullet-point argument is stronger than one that is not.

Supposedly correlates with dog vs cat ownership, but I can't find the reference.

The tendency to purchase and collect mass-produced things of modest value, yet think of them as "investments". Exploited by The Franklin Mint, JTV, Hamilton, etc.

Could the mods knock out:

Is, or will be, in favour of banning sex robots

Dislike for lab-grown/cultivated/cultured meat

Both of these seem to me to be trivial, for the reason that they are policy questions that conservativism as a whole has already taken a side on.

Dang, I just thought of a good one but I’m too late “Prefer sitting next to a conversation partner rather than across from them” which relates to a correlation I’d heard of about liberals being more attentive to the direction of a person’s gaze than a conservative

I have extended the question because it's going to be ages before I have the data

Can't wait for the resolution, this is my personal olympics 🙀

bought Ṁ25 NO

there's a lot of pro-organic / anti-GMO on the left too

Lives in a trailer.

@PaperBoy Is this one surpriing in the least?

Yeah it’s probably not unexpected/surprising at all. There is plenty of literature talking about conservatism being correlated with aversion to trying new things, higher disgust response, etc., and obviously there’s the culture war piece. But I do think it’s kinda weird if you remove the culture war and just look at trying to tie an aversion like that to conservatism as a philosophy (i.e. Burke). There I don’t see a clear connection, but I’m also no expert in that space. 🤷‍♂️

there's definitely a small segment of very-online right wingers who meme about hating lab grown meat. OTOH buying local, buying organic, buying non-gmo, and hating big business are pretty left-coded and militate against lab grown meat.

Veganism/Vegetarianism and people who acknowledge that the meat industry is unethical while being unable to resist meat themselves are all also very left coded imo, and many of those people that I've talked to also acknowledge that lab grown meat will probably be one of the most effecient ways to reduce the harm done by the meat industry, whereas I imagine conservatives are more likely to see it as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

bought Ṁ10 NO

is there any minimum threshold for the size of the correlation?

Nope, just significance at the 0.01 level with a minimum sample of 500 and at least 500 conservatives

EDIT: This is a typo on my part. It should be 500 and at least 150 conservatives.

With a sample of only 500, you will need a very large difference to get that significance level

That was my first instinct too but it seems that even a correlation of 0.17 will have a 75 % probability of coming out as significant. This seems fair, given the large number of hypotheses tested.

bought Ṁ10 NO

how much are you going to p-hack trying different controls?

What are "existential concerns"?
Concerned world will end? Civilization? My life?
For each of these, I'd expect a different relationship.

I didn't add that option, but I think I'm going to interpret it as something like "How often do you worry about all humans dying- for example, through nuclear war, rogue AI, biological warfare or any other means."

uh oh, that's not how I interpreted it when I bet on it. When I google "existential concerns" I get results about the big 5 existential concerns which are: awareness of inevitability of death, need to feel connected to others, a clear sense of who one is and how one fits into the world, experience of free will, and desire to believe life is meaningful. I am expecting conservative atheists to struggle more than liberal atheists with concerns over the meaning of life, free will, who they are, what will happen after death, and how they relate to other people, not that they literally worry about all humans dying.

My main takeaway is that for a correlation to be confirmed, it must be statistically significant… not just slightly different. I don’t know what the methodology will be (chi squared, Student t-test, significance level, sample size, etc,) but I would be cautious about predicting YES on some of the more ambiguous ones.

Related questions

© Manifold Markets, Inc.Terms + Mana-only TermsPrivacyRules