Replication Data for: Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge

Despite widespread concern over false beliefs about politically-relevant facts, little is known about how strongly Americans believe their answers to poll questions. I propose a conceptual framework for characterizing survey responses about facts: self-awareness, or how well people can assess their own knowledge. I measure self-awareness of political knowledge by eliciting respondent certainty about answers to 24 factual questions about politics. Even on “unfavorable” facts that are inconvenient to the respondent’s political party, more-certain respondents are more likely to answer correctly. Because people are somewhat aware of their ignorance, respondents usually describe their incorrect responses as low-certainty guesses, not high-certainty beliefs. Where misperceptions exist, they tend to be bipartisan: Democrats and Republicans perform poorly on the same questions and explain their answers using similar points of reference.尽管社会各界普遍担忧民众对涉政事实存在错误认知，但目前学界对美国人在回答民调问题时所持信念的坚定程度仍知之甚少。本文提出了一套用于刻画事实类调查回应的概念框架：自我认知（self-awareness），即个体对自身知识水平的评估能力。本文通过征集受访者对24道涉政事实类问题答案的确信程度，来衡量其政治知识层面的自我认知水平。即便针对与受访者所属政党立场相悖的“不利事实”，信念更坚定的受访者也更有可能给出正确答案。由于民众对自身的认知局限存在一定程度的觉知，受访者通常会将答错的回答归因于低确信度的猜测，而非高确信度的信念。当出现认知偏差时，这类偏差往往具有跨党派性：民主党与共和党受访者在相同问题上的表现均欠佳，且其答题时所依托的参考逻辑也高度相似。