[BRIEF NOTE] On polls and language

[rfmcdonald]

A while back, Joe. My. God linked to an American poll on queers in the military that had some interesting results.

In the poll, 59 percent say they now support allowing "homosexuals" to serve in the U.S. military, including 34 percent who say they strongly favor that. Ten percent say they somewhat oppose it and 19 percent say they strongly oppose it.

But the numbers differ when the question is changed to whether Americans support "gay men and lesbians" serving in the military. When the question is asked that way, 70 percent of Americans say they support gay men and lesbians serving in the military, including 19 percent who say they somewhat favor it. Seven percent somewhat oppose it, and 12 percent strongly oppose it.

When it comes to whether Americans support allowing gays to serve openly, there is also a difference based on the term used. When referred to as "homosexuals," 44 percent favor allowing them to serve openly. When referred to as "gay men and lesbians," the percentage rises to 58 percent.

Marginal Revolution picked this up independently, and some of the commenters there went on to make their own conclusions. Wagster, for instance, pointed out the subjectivity of language.

It's important to understand why the response changes. The respondent doesn't like gay men and lesbians more than homosexuals, but he/she is speaking to a stranger over the phone about a volatile subject. If the interviewer uses words gay people use to self-identify, then the respondent -- in order to not offend -- will respond favorably. If the interviewer uses the words that gay rights opponents use, again the respondent will attempt to not offend, and bend with the direction the interviewer is signaling.

I used to be a phone interviewer in college. Actually doing the interviews yourself makes you take them with a rather larger grain of salt when you read about them.

Albatross went on to argue that the term "homosexual" isn't closely associated in most people's minds with actual people, therein the problem.

Somehow, this makes me think of the common mental bias in which you think something is more likely because I give you a more vivid description. Homosexuals sounds kind of generic, and you don't automatically have a mental picture. Gay men and lesbians gives you more of a picture--it makes the question less about a category of faceless people, and more about people you can visualize. I suspect that this effect has to do with making the question more personal, or more about a story the person responding to can visualize, and less about abstract questions of rights or laws.

Is there a term for this kind of bias w.r.t. empathy? You can give me infant mortality and malnutrition statistics for Bangladesh, or you can show me a picture of a starving Bangladeshi child, and I'm pretty sure #2 is more likely to get me to donate money.

(Me, I think of "gay" or "queer" as applying to people and to movements, and "homosexual" as being more than faintly medical and often subjected to pejorative uses by homophobes.)

Picking the right rhetoric for a campaign, any campaign, obviously matters, and the terms "gay" and "lesbian" are the words that people seem most ready to handle. Does anyone think that this is sophistry?