Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion

[Raidyr]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/older-people-are-worse-than-young-people-at-telling-fact-from-opinion/573739/

Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did. Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did. And 18-to-29-year-olds performed more than twice as well as the 65+ set. Of the latter group, only 17 percent classified all five facts as factual statements.

On the individual questions, the identification gap was particularly large regarding the nature of the American government and questions about immigration, but there was no statement that younger Americans did not identify with equal or higher accuracy than their elders.

An earlier study by the American Press Institute also found that older Americans were more confident than younger ones in their ability to discern fact from opinion.

[AtomicSans]

No shit, they grew up during the Fairness Doctrine so they never had to learn or exercise critical thinking when consuming news content.

[Download]

Not surprising given the stupidity I've seen shared on Facebook by older people.

[Rossy167]

The results of this are kind of ridiculous for old and young too. I'm always a little depressed when I see charts like this where Americans respond to basic statements for some kind of study.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/166399/c639cf4b-3198-4895-a2b9-db5e94f8e7c4/image.png

[Sableye]

yes. they also assume both sides have an equal validity, so "there is catastrophic climate change on the way" is equally as valid as "its a chinese hoax"