The Polls - Modern Morals

Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report last week entitled, “A Barometer of Modern Morals: Sex, Drugs, and the 1040.”  Respondents were asked to classify ten behaviors as “morally acceptable, morally wrong, or not a moral issue.”  The following results provide the percentages of people classifying each behavior as morally wrong:

Married people having an affair	88%
Not reporting all income on taxes	79%
Drinking alcohol excessively	61%
Having an abortion	52%
Smoking marijuana	50%
Homosexual behavior	50%
Lying to spare someone's feelings	43%
Sex between unmarried adults	35%
Gambling	35%
Overeating	32%
N = 745
Sampling error: +/- 4%
Interview dates: February 1-5, 2006

The complete report, with breakdowns by age, gender, education, ideology, etc., is available here.  A one-page overview that includes breakdowns only by education levels is available here.  Note that this overview lists a misleading n of 1502, which is the number of respondents for a larger survey.  Just short of one-half of these 1502 respondents were asked the “modern morals” questions on which this report is based.

Comments

[cheap laptops canada]

Bringing innovative methods to speed up the work process will surely pave the way for our future success.

[Costa Rica Real Estate]

Education is a fundamental tool for the development of a country. It requires the efforts of governments so that she reaches all social strata, especially the poorest.

[Laura Beth Nielsen]

Ask any 10 random people -- about 3 should be able to tell you. The natural qualitative follow up to baffling quantitative data -- now that's fun research!

[Chris W. Bonneau]

I'd be interested on what basis "overeating" is classified as morally wrong!