Whoa!
We were just fooling around with the design of study stimuli (you know, things like this & this), & all of a sudden one of us (AR) comes up with this graphic image the content of which we can't agree on! Half of us on hand in the lab that day saw Hayek & the other half Honey Boo Boo! WTF?!!
Check it out!
So who is it? Hayek? Honey Boo Boo? Weird!
Next we showed it to a nationally representative sample of 482 million Americans on MTurk. It turns out that 24.75% see Hayek, 24.75% Honey Boo, 24.75% the Marlboro Man, and 24.75% Michael Moore.
Even more astonishingly, there was a 0.999*** correlation between which of those characters the subjects reported seeing and their "cultural worldviews" as measured with the CCW scales!
Those seeing either Hayek or Honey Boo Boo turned out to be either Egalitarian Individualists or Hierarch Communitarians, respectively-- of course! The Marlboro Man? Yup: Hierarchical Individualists! And Michael Moore--Egalitarian Communitarians, naturally.
Actually, if you back up or move forward (zoom in, zoom out), you'll likely see the image morph from one of these characters into the other.
Pretty cool, don't you think?!
Now one more thing that will really blow your mind.
It turns out that 1% of the subjects in our study didn't see any of these characters but someone else entirely. They gave consistent descriptions of him/her, but we have no idea who he or she actually is!
We were able to figure out, though, that the 1% of the people who saw this non-conforming, weird image were ... Ludwicks! The super rare types who actually form risk-perception clusters that don't conform to the ones characteristic of their cultural group!
This is, of course, a real breakthrough, since before now we had no reliable predictive indicators for identifying Ludwicks!
For sure we'll be using this graphic, in place of the short-form CWV scales, in all future studies.
Weirdest freak discovery since Michaelson-Morley device proved speed of light is a constant! What a strange world we live in!
Nice work, AR! (Makes up for your vomiting on my laptop this morning, for sure.)
