Confirmation Bias And Economic Knowledge

Daniel B. Klein and Zeljka Buturovic did a study about a year ago that you may have heard about which purported to show that self-identified liberals and progressives had lower levels of understanding about economics. One response that occurred to me at the time was that the survey's questions seemed to have been selected so as to ensure that the left-wing answer was also the wrong one. Now they've run a new study with different questions and the results appear to indicate that the gap is, indeed, all about which questions you ask:

Basically when you ask questions where the left-wing answer is also the one supported by economics, suddenly left-wing people have a better understanding of economics. But when you ask the other set of questions, it comes out the other way. Basically, there's a lot of confirmation bias out there. This is why I think people who teach economics ought to think harder about their choice of examples when teaching.