E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

He looks like he should be the host of a Running Man style of distopian game show

 

I'm no academic - but posit such studies, or even general prevailing sentiment that boils down to "people that think this way are stupid" just reinforces and emboldens them.

The demographics of the vote were already well understood, and entirely unsurprising.

This research seems purely self-serving for the authors designed for notoriety alone, to just give news publications clickbait headlines that further divide opinions.

 

You're right, when news outlets pick this up they will definitely give it a balanced assessment and ensure that is represented in the headline

The suggestion that people with lower cognitive abilities are more susceptible to manipulation is in no way groundbreaking - I stand by my assertion that the paper was purely self-serving.

And this is exactly what I was referring to - "the media reported that these experts think I'm stupid, well I'll show them" - distancing themselves from the media and the experts in the process. And they're certainly not reading the paper, because they're dumdums remember.

 

All good points, and ones I'm not looking to argue with either.
My comments mainly stem from a general "ick" of what's effectively the gamification of research in the UK courtesy of REF, and how that's influencing said research... there's probably a few good papers in there somewhere.

 

In general, I don't think I doubt the intentions of the study's authors - according to their introduction, they claim it was novel research, which is something that most researchers are going to strive for. There are plenty of debates to be had about whether constantly striving for novel research is a Good Thing(TM) or whether we should give equal importance to replication studies, and those debates are already well underway. But it's somewhat of a tangent to the subject at hand.

The bigger problem is how the science is communicated to the public. By the researchers themselves, by the university/institution press release (which often doesn't involve the researchers at all), and the media in general. This study certainly has the potential to be thoroughly exploited by the media because... well... when it's such a divisive subject the headlines practically write themselves: "New study says that people who voted for Brexit are stupid". But again, that's not a situation that's unique to this study alone - how many times have we seen "Scientists say X causes cancer" in the Daily Mail or similar, and when you actually go off and read the study that was published it rarely says anything of the sort*.

Rarely is science communication done well.

*In fact in the case of cancer research, the study often does say that. But the part that's left out is that it's a slight increase in the instance of cancer in mice or rats which have been specifically bred to be susceptible to certain types of cancer.

 

Stoopid is international. Many people in the Netherlands are already going:

 

So a little bit brexit then? carried over the line by people who wanted to give the govt a kicking but didn't think it'd win...