youth of today

Disturbing Red Cross poll showing most Americans teenagers pro-torture here. But here's the thing; teenagers are idiots. Comparing this to the adults poll isn't that meaningful; you'd need to compare it to pre-Bush teenagers.

Of course, in those days nobody was asking Americans whether they were pro-torture or not, because they thought they knew the answer ...

Comments

[cian]

Depends upon what questions were asked, and how they were asked. Its very easy to bias respondents on an emotive topic like that (hard enough on non-emotive subjects), and while I don't have any evidence for this, I suspect that teenagers would be more susceptible to that kind of thing than adults.

So US teenagers could simply be more susceptible to poorly worded, or leading, questions than adults.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

teenagers are idiots

I think that's over strong, given the proffered evidence: the poll appears to show that teenagers are only 8% more likely to be an idiot than an adult.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

A Grammatical idiot writes:
that should have been : 8% more likely to be an idiot than an adult is to be an idiot.

[Shuggy]

The only thing I found surprising about the survey was that 40% of teenagers were *against*. American teenagers must be more liberal-minded than the ones I meet. ;-)

[ajay]

Or else they just don't know what "torture" means and are worried that it might mean something nice. Involving, I don't know, torte or something.

[BenSix]

Could we compare this to the demographics of 24's audience?

[chris y]

Shuggy hits the nail on the head. Teenagers (assuming we mean the whole span of 13-19, rather than just the school leaver/University age group) tend to be overwhelmingly authoritarian, judgemental and vengeful. It's something most of them grow out of towards the end of their teens, but we shouldn't be surprised to see such attitudes as this reflected in polls.

OTOH, I'm still not fully buying it until I see the questions.

[skidmarx]

Four times as many adults unsure as to the right answer as youth. I'm not sure about that. There may be madness in the methodology.

Still, I'm with the glass half-full crowd here.