30 minutes with a stranger

Just an observation, not a mean critique about the project or even the conclusions.

There's 180 participants.

There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.

There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample.

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Then we have 31 people marked as liberal, which is 17% of the sample.

And we have 63 people marked as conservative, which is 35% of the sample.

That already I would say is kind of an issue: more than a third of the sample are conservative people and 17% are their liberal 'counter part' or 'equivalent' (sorry for my wording, I'm not native speaker).

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If we do a little additions we therefore have:

39+63 = 102, which means that 56% of the sample is conservative

31+26= 57, which means that 31% of the sample is liberal

The rest of the sample are centrists or "neutrals" (whatever this means)

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I am NOT saying that the study is invalid I am not saying that it's poorly done

However, I think it's fair to say that the sample is skewed towards people with conservative views, by a HUGE amount, not just "a little bit".

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Aside from this: amazing UI design, I'm jealous and admirative of the results ^^

In the US, registered liberals/Dems outnumber conservatives. However this study has more conservatives. It could be geography. Some states are more conservative than others. Or it could be that the $15 on offer is more appealing to conservatives.

>There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.

> There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample

I think these numbers are off. Where are you getting that from? Is there raw data somewhere?

I counted the people on the page and see 39 very conservative and 47 very liberal (not 26).

I did not check the other numbers. But with that its 78 liberals which is 43%. And the total liberals + conservatives are 180. So I dont think the total participant number is 180 - thats just the total of liberals and conservatives.

And if its a 56/43 (~1.3) split for conservatives that seems to actually udnerrepresent conservatives compared to the general population without moderates. Where we see a 36/25 (1.44) conservative/liberal split in terms of ideology, not voter registration, which I think aligns more closely with the "political views" label.

>The way Americans identify themselves ideologically was unchanged in 2021, continuing the close division that has persisted in recent years between those describing themselves as either conservative or moderate, while a smaller share identifies as liberal. On average last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and 25% as liberal.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...

The study denotes "political views", not party registration, which have historically deviated. Part affiliation has been quite even for a long time between Republicans and Democrats but political ideology has had a significant conservative skew going back at least 30 years https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.

If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.

In percentages, that's 20.5%, 35.3%, 12.6%, 16.3%, 15.3%. Roughly 56% conservatives, 32% liberals.

If I make the window really wide, I see 20 squares in a row and 13 rows, a total of 260 squares. The distribution is now 39, 100, 37, 46, 38.

In percentages, that's 15.0%, 38.4%, 14.2%, 17.7%, 14.6%. Roughly 53% conservatives, 32% liberals.

It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?

Conclusions:

1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.

2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.

Great work... I thought I noticed something similar on the resizing. I guess they prioritized looks over accuracy which is kind of fair although its not obvious why they would have to do it this way.

In any case, it would be good to see the actual data for this stuff.

Thanks for the correction ^^