Raise! Conservatives and Liberals

I enjoy collecting, organizing, and interpreting data on a variety of issues. One of the best ways to find out information is to simply ask people. The way that I have found most success with this is through surveys. Surveys are quick and easy tools to find out relevant information from a variety of people in a very short time. Either way, I recently ran a survey on what I consider to be quite an original concept.

The thought occurred to me while I was taking a train back from Budapest to Prague sometime in May. I was playing the fun game of "Asshole" with a couple buddies of mine, and for some reason or another, I pondered whether or not there was any correlation between political ideology and the personal habits of a player playing poker.

I guess, at first glance, this may seem like a silly correlation to even explore. However, think about the extent to which one's political ideology impacts a person's actions and thoughts. People's political ideologies can represent a great deal about their ideas on faith, the economy, abortion, gun control, free speech, etc. These are all extremely lofty ideals, and one's political ideology can dictate a lot about them, so why couldn't political ideology also depict something about how a person plays poker?

I wanted to find out just that. So I ran a survey and I want to explain my results here.

• Poker Survey

My poker survey was made up of two distinct portions. The first portion was collecting information on individuals political ideologies on a scale of very conservative (1) to very liberal (5). There were other questions that I threw in the collecting information stage to throw off the true intent of the survey, like what people's favorite fast food was and what their eye color is. I will also reveal these results.

After I collected this information, I wanted to gather information on poker playing habits, and the general consensus of particular moves that can be made in poker as they relate to betting. I provided the people who took the survey with 10 separate scenarios in which they had to judge how "aggressive" the move was. I defined aggressive as, "making bold moves and attempting to push players around in order to maximize favorable outcomes."

This definition of "aggressiveness" stemmed out of my hypothesis that liberals would be more aggressive in playing poker than conservatives. I was drawn to this conclusion after researching and reading about some of the characteristics of liberal ideology that you can read further about here.

Anyway, the intent of the first survey was to collect information on the average aggressiveness of the 10 poker scenarios that I provided. I wanted to get a collective idea of how aggressive people would consider the particular move, on average. I made people rank each move between least aggressive (1) and most aggressive (5).

**Click the Image to see it more clearly**

On average, the 34 respondents believed that Scenario 10 was the most aggressive, with an average score of 3.82/5. Scenario 10 was, "You are holding Queen, 5. The board shows 5, Queen, Ace after the flop. Another player bets 50. You call. The turn shows a King. Another player bets 75. You call. The river shows an Ace. The other player checks to you. You bet 100."

On average, the least aggressive move was Scenario 4 with an average score of 2.03/5, "After the turn, you have picked up a straight. After the flop someone bet 30, and you called hoping to pick up your straight. You did. You are first to move. You bet 30."

At this point, I was very satisfied with my findings thus far. In gathering my information, I also wanted to gauge how familiar my respondents were with the game of poker, and this group was particularly well educated with an average familiarity of 4.24/5 and a mode (most frequent response) of 5/5. Therefore, I felt pretty confident that when I asked these scenarios, the respondents knew what I was talking about.

Some of the unnecessary information gathering related to eye color of the respondent and their favorite fast food. Respondents had the choice of green (1), blue (2), brown (3), hazel (4), and other (5) as potential eye colors. This particular group had an equal amount of brown eyed people as hazel eyed people (12 each). The rest were made up of 7 blue and 3 green.

Fast food was another component that I wanted to learn more about, for no particular reason really. The group was given the choice of the following: 1=Burger King, 2=McDonalds, 3=Taco Bell, 4=Wendy's, 5=Subway. Based on my findings, 14 went with Subway, 6 went with Wendy's, 5 went with Taco Bell, 6 with McDonalds, and only 3 with Burger King. Healthy group we got here.

The most critical information that I need to gather was political ideology. Remember, this was ranked on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being very conservative and 5 being very liberal. This group of 34 respondents had an average political ideology of 3.5/5, indicating a slightly liberal collective standing. This is verified by the mode of 4/5, which identified the individual as liberal. 2 individuals identified themselves as very liberal, 17 identified as liberal, 11 as moderate, and 4 as conservative.

Now that I had gotten a collective average for each scenario, I needed to then go back and survey individuals on what they would do in particular. The way that I presented this, was to ask them if they were presented with the scenario, how many times out of 10 would they agree with the move. This allowed for individual variation, and even if a particular scenario received an overwhelmingly high score in its aggressiveness, an individual could diminish this score with their own personal habits.

So, by taking the respondents answer in the second part of the survey as a fraction, ie, 7/10 would be equivalent to agreeing with a particular move 7 times, and multiplying this fraction by the average aggressiveness scores for each scenario from the first survey, and then finally averaging the individual's scores together, I would arrive at a personal aggressiveness score for the individual.

For instance, consider 3.82 (the aggressiveness for Scenario 10 provided above). An individual may agree with Scenario 10, 6 out of 10 times, which means that the following equation would result: (6/10)(3.82) = 2.292. Therefore, for this particular individual the actual aggressiveness of Scenario 10 would contribute to their overall score as 2.292. This would be done 9 other times to account for all the scenarios and then averaged.

I have graphed these results in the following chart:

**Click the Image to see it more clearly**

• Conclusion

The purpose of this experiment was to determine if there was a correlation between political ideology and aggressiveness in playing poker. My hypothesis was that liberals would be more aggressive when playing poker than their conservative counterparts. Based on my findings, the opposite appears to be more likely. The highest aggressiveness score was achieved by a conservative and slowly decreased the more liberal an individual was.

This is an interesting result, however, I would urge further analysis on this topic. The R-Squared value (a statistic that will give some information about the goodness of fit of a model), is a dismal 0.0888, which indicates that the data found is not the best fit for this model.

In the future, a larger pool of respondents in the second part of the survey would make it more accurate. Otherwise, if you're sitting down at a table ready to play some poker with a group of conservatives, play defense.