YourMorals.Org

The scale you completed was a General Political Knowledge scale for American politics that we developed and is based on work by Michael Delli Carpini, Scott Keeter, Milton Lodge, and Charles Taber.

The scale measures the factual knowledge people possess about politics. We used questions about three broad topics: 1) civics and what the government is and does (e.g. who has the final responsibility to decide if a law is constitutional or not?); 2) public officials or leaders (e.g. who is the current Speaker of the House?); and 3) political parties (e.g. which party is more conservative on a national scale?).

The idea behind this scale is that objective factual knowledge may be an important factor in studies about political issues and reasoning. It may be that people who are more informed about politics (whether they're liberal or conservative) think and reason differently about moral or political issues than people who are less informed. For instance, are people who are more informed more or less likely to objectively evaluate political arguments? We suspect that, ironically, people with more political knowledge may be less objective when it comes to a number of information processes (see recommended reading below).

The graphs below show your scores (in green) compared to those of the average liberal (in blue), the average conservative (in red), and the average libertarian (in orange) visitor to this website. The first graph shows your score on the political knowledge scale in comparison to other liberals and conservatives and scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score) to 19 (the highest possible score).

You are a member of the group:LessWrong and those results are shown with the Grey bar.

The graph below illustrates the amount of media exposure to news event you have in comparison to other liberals and conservatives and scores range from 0 (no exposure to news media) to 7 (maximum exposure to news media).