Birthers Rarely Leave U.S., Less Likely To Vote: Hunch Profile
Hunch, a new website that helps people make decisions based on survey questions, found some interesting stuff when they crunched the numbers on site users who described themselves as "birthers".
Asked a series of political questions, 12 percent of Hunch users said they did not believe the president was born in the United States. (About 2,200 Hunch users answered the question.) The Hunch team decided to see how they responded to other queries.
According to their answers, birthers are less educated, watch more TV, and read fewer books than non-birthers.
Some 43 percent of them have never traveled outside of their home country. They're 24 percent more likely to speak only a single language. They are 63% less likely to have ever owned a passport.
A third of them didn't vote in the last presidential election. Forty-four percent of them believe that the Big Bang didn't really happen and 47 percent don't believe in global warming. Birthers are also 19 percent more likely to believe in UFOs and alien visits to earth and 50 percent more likely to believe in alien abductions.
Interestingly, birthers are 115 percent more likely to think that human beings are naturally evil rather than good.
"What this data shows very consistently is that compared to those who believe Obama's credentials are legitimate, birthers are less educated and less likely to believe in widely-accepted scientific principles, yet more likely to believe in theories like alien abductions," said Kelly Ford, Vice President of Marketing at Hunch. "This may explain why they've passionately latched on to a birth conspiracy theory that by now has generally been dismissed as quite far-fetched."
This sample, of course, is small and unscientific.
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The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner
First Posted: 10-29-09 03:21 PM | Updated: 10-29-09 05:42 PM