This is approximately the 3,602nd episode in the insanely popular CCP series, "Wanna see more data? Just ask!," the game in which commentators compete for world-wide recognition and fame by proposing amazingly clever hypotheses that can be tested by re-analyzing data collected in one or another CCP study. For "WSMD?, JA!" rules and conditions (including the mandatory release from defamation claims), click here.
“Loyal listener” @Joshua wonders if the correlation between age and conservatism might be explained by a decline in science curiosity. He was motivated to pose this interesting question in part by the interesting constraint that science curiosity imposes on politically movitated reasoning.
It was in the course of trying to construct some helpful models on this question that I came across the data featured in the last couple of posts on age, political knowledge, & partisanship.
But now let's consider curiosity:
1. The zero-order correlation between science curiosity & age is trivial. A linear model (again) appears to fit the relationship here pretty well. The correlation between science curiosity (as we measure it) and age is negligible—r = 0.03, p = 0.20. For purposes of illustration, consider the probability density distributions of science curiosity for three age cohorts:
It therefore seems unlikely that some age-related deficit in science curiosity is contributing much to the oft-observed relationship between age and conservatism.
2. The additive effect of (a) science curiosity and (b) age on the intensification of partisanship appears to be very modest and is driven by latter. In a multivariate regression, science curiosity and age both make independent, additive contributions (they don’t interact, a finding featured in Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing, Tbl. S3) to conservatism. But it is reasonably clear that (b) is responsible for most of the age-conservatism effect.
Consider:
It can be seen here that both science curiosity and age are having an effect. The impact of the former, however, is uniform across the age continuum; it doesn’t seem to be adding to the conservatism of older citizens in a distinct way.
3. We won’t really be able to make more sense of all this until the effect of science curiosity can be assessed in relation to political knowledge and to personality traits that inform PT theory. As the last post showed, there was a massive missing-variable bias in my analyses of age, resulting from the omission of political knowledge. Accordingly, I am reluctant to form a strong opinion on the importance of age-related curiosity without taking political knowledge into account. Unfortunately, I don’t have a dataset with both political knowledge and curiosity.
It would also be interesting, I’m sure, to add measures of the “Big 5” personality traits, especially since one of the measures—openness to experience—is sometimes assumed to evince intellectual curiosity generally.