At times when social issues end their experiencers collide - such as while answering survey questions - a dominance relationship unfailingly results. A respondent dominates an issue when he/she feels positively, while an issue dominates a respondent when he/she feels negatively. Given two issues, a transitivity of this dominance is often coveted since it installs predictability: one’s attitude towards one topic will carry information about his/her attitude towards the other. In this work, using data from a recent Bentley-Gallup study surveying 5835 individuals and the mathematics of Guttman outliers, we test whether - and how intensely - this transitivity persists among sections of the population (partitioned by politics, age, and gender) through observations such as very conservative young men who believe that businesses should take a stance on political candidates are extremely likely to have checked a company’s political endorsements before buying a product. We show how groups that differ on one (of three) demographic detail fall on opposite ends of the predictability spectrum. Topics such as businesses’ involvement with political candidates, climate change, international conflicts, or DEI issues function well in a predictive mix, potentially helping most to infer how respondents would feel about other opinion or action items.
Zahirodini et al. (Sun,) studied this question.