Pop culture still more popular than politics

August 15, 2006

This will no doubt come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but Zogby offers additional proof that Americans know a bit more about popular culture than they do about more serious matters of state — but not quite as much as I thought.

Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices, according to a poll on pop culture.

According to the poll by Zogby International, commissioned by the makers of a new game show, 57% of Americans could identify J.K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, but only 50% could name the British prime minister, Tony Blair.

Just over 60% of respondents were able to name Bart as Homer’s son on the television show “The Simpsons,” compared to 20.5% who were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic poems, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60% named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37% knew that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.

Now, maybe this is some kind of soft bigotry of low expectations, but I didn’t find these results that bad. Half of the county knows who the British prime minister is? That’s kind of encouraging. One in five know Homer wrote “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”? That’s almost impressive.

And more than one-in-three Americans know that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun? Isn’t that a sign of some kind of scientific renaissance in our society? I would have guessed a far smaller number.

Is it me or are these results pretty good?

Homer Simpson wrote a book?

  • Actually, I thought the Mercury result was a little surprisingly low — I just thought that was drummed into most schoolkids pretty well — but nothing surprising about the rest.

    We learn/memorize through repeated exposures, don’t we? And if you’re not inclined to watch the news or read a newspaper, your exposure to Tony Blair is extremely limited. But if you watch television at all — and most people do — The Simpsons is likely to have attracted your interest at some point in time….

  • It starts at the top…..

    “But I thought they were Muslims?”
    G.W. Bush on hearing about Suni and Shiite divisions after the invasion.

  • I’m pretty shocked that so few of those Muggles could identify the boy wizard. How many movies has he had already?

  • This shows why the conservative slant of TV news is so dangerous: people know more about their world from watching a TV screen or silver screen than from the written word.

  • A lot of this is just name recognition and amount of exposure to TeeVee (as Catherine #2 suggests). I wonder how they’d do with just one follow-up question. Examples:

    * Identify a decision by each of the two justices you named.
    * Tell me anything about Tony (“Yo”) Blair other than his title.
    * In a sentence, identify the topic covered in “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” (or name just one other ancient Greek poet).
    * How many moons does Mercury have? or How long is Mercury’s year?

    When I took a course in Political Philosophy at the University of San Fancisco (pre-socratic through 19th century Europe), our final exam was oral. Each of us had individual appointments with the professor, a Jesuit. It took him no longer than 10 minutes to plumb the depths of what we had learned; many students were disposed of in two minutes or less. The key was the followup, delving just a little more deeply.

  • Frankly CB I think these results suck.

    http://www.zogby.com/wf-AOL%20National.pdf

    Q8. What are the three Branches of the American Government?
    42.3% knew.

    Q12. Name 2 current Justices on the Supreme Court.
    63% were not sure!

    Come on! No friggin wonder we have George W. Bush and the Neocon Junta in power. Everyone has their head up their turtleneck.

    Ed’s follow-up detail questions may be a bit extreme but understanding and participation in your democracy should not be on par with fans of American Idol.

  • I believe that it was P.T. Barnum who said that “You can never go wrong underestimating the inteligence of the American public.” Sad but true.

  • Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices, according to a poll on pop culture.

    Did they get partial credit for listing Dopey and Grumpy as Supreme Court justices?

    🙂

  • A lot of this is just name recognition and amount of exposure to TeeVee.

    And a lot more of it is just recognizing what’s directly related to one’s life, including personal history, aspirations, entertainment, etc., and what’s not. I mean, half of the American public doesn’t vote, believing that whoever is in power isn’t going to affect their everyday lives. Are they wrong? Not entirely, in that tracing the effect of political decisions down to the level of individuals can be pretty hard to do. Sure, if you’re a soldier in Iraq and a Democratic President gets elected, you may be more likely to get home, but when Alito swings a decision that allows a cop to hassle you on a street corner with a bit less restraint, that connection may be tough to see.

  • AHHHHH!!! It’s YOU! When I hear results like that I go absolutely CRAZY! How the hell are things ever going to get better if we hear that Americans, especially young Americans, don’t know shit about some of the most important public figures on EARTH and our reaction is “Actually, that ain’t too bad.” Meanwhile public schools go unfunded, those numbers get WORSE, and pretty soon we wonder why we’re losing out to Moldova on the world stage. Argh.

  • Only 60 percent could name Krypron is where Superman came from? For goodness sake, what country did they grow up in?

  • Somewhat hopeful, but not much. A majority still thinks Iraq had WMD, and I wonder how many can tell Iraq from Iran. That may become important pretty soon.

    To kurt: It was Henry Mencken who said “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

    a wise man indeed.

    He also said: “The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.”

    an even more prescient quote about fear…
    “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
    — Bertrand Russell

    OK, I’ll stop now, here’s a fun link: http://www.quotedb.com/

  • I agree (as per usual on anything not related to third parties) with MNP.

    Q8. What are the three Branches of the American Government?
    42.3% knew.

    We often lament here that no one seems to care about unchecked executive power, but how would the public possibly get stirred up about Congress refusing to provide an institutional balance to the President when less than half of the public even knows there are three branches, much less how they are supposed to function with regard to one another? Nothing can really be expected to change until we get civic literacy back — and without our own little madrassas teaching the American Taliban orthodoxy in the texts.

  • A poll like this doesn’t worry me so much. Sure, the questions about the three branches of government and the Supreme Court Justices worry me a little, but a lot of the rest is frivilous. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun…who cares and how will that ever affect me? Too much we focus on remembering facts and judging that as a sound education.

    Not that I am a optimistic guy. The poll doesn’t worry me too much because I am already extremely worried about the state of reasoning in this country. People don’t know how to argue(civilly), they can’t recognize bad arguments, and are generally easily swayed by whomever seems the most confident/has the shortest words and sentences. We need to be teaching more rhetoric/reasoning.

  • Alito, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Souter, Stevens, and Thomas.

    Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, and Sleepy.

    There—all in alphabetical order, too. Betcha the dimwit in the White House couldn’t do that….

  • I really, really wonder about some of those other polls that compare Americans’ knowledge of current events vs pop culture. CB posted one that was just embarassing and I have a difficult time beleiving in its accuracy. This poll, on the other hand, I can believe much more.

    The numbers have that truthiness to them. 😀

  • You really need to reassess your perspective, CB. 20% could name one of Homer’s poems? Only 37% knew that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun? This is not exactly grad school material. I don’t see how anyone could call these results “pretty good.”

  • Seems to me there’s an tacit bias towards the academic in these questions. You could do the same thing by asking questions about, say, automotive repair, and then rail about the millions of people who sit behind their steering wheels not knowing the difference between a differential and a distributor.

  • Q8. What are the three Branches of the American Government?
    Money, Television, and Bullshit 🙂

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