Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a
right . . . and a desire to know.
—John Adams
A core fnding of public opinion research is that most voters do not know much about the
policy debates that occur among academic experts, Congress, and the bureaucracy and are
covered in the press. Their knowledge is thin, ofen confused, and sometimes mistaken
(Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Lupia 2015). To some extent, this is inevitable, because indi
vidual voters usually lack the incentives to acquire costly information about policy decisions
over which they will have microscopic infuence. This would be a dismal situation if voters
thought they were well informed and were impervious to new information. But there is little
research on which areas they feel uninformed about and desire to know more. Voters’ policy
information is admittedly imperfect, but is it susceptible to improvement?
This question is likely more urgent in an era of siloed information segmentation and media that
rejects balance and alternative interpretations of data, ofen substituting opinion for objec
tive fact. Further, social media incentivizes extreme statements because they are most likely to
gather disproportionately more attention. To these matters, add the risks from the impending
wide availability of generative artifcial intelligence. As famed Princeton psychologist and Nobel
laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011, 62) notes, “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods
is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
We have begun a new project to measure not just the preferences and beliefs that Americans
have about a range of policies, but also how much Americans think they (and their fellow citizens)
know about these policies, and whether they think they would beneft from acquiring more, and
more accurate, information about such policies. Our goal is to identify areas of policymaking in
which it is feasible to improve the public’s understanding of the costs and benefts of alternative
policy choices. We are conducting a series of polls that ask voters how much they know com
pared with others about the details of policies and how useful additional information would be
to their making more informed choices.