CURIOUS how things work. I'm watching Stephen Lennon, leader of the extreme-right English Defence League, on TV acknowledging that, while he in no way condones the enormity of the attacks in Norway, he can see where they're coming from. "Christ, look at how desperate people are getting. You suppress people's right to have their say, you could create a problem in which people go underground."

Moments later, I read a post from Robin Hanson (via Andrew Sullivan) on a paper by Marianne Bertrand of Chicago Business School and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT, finding that often survey respondents have no coherent opinions on issues whatsoever, and invent them simply because the surveyor is asking.

Perhaps the most devastating problem with subjective [survey] questions, however, is the possibility that attitudes may not “exist” in a coherent form. A first indication of such problems is that measured attitudes are quite unstable over time. For example, in two surveys spaced a few months apart, the same subjects were asked about their views on government spending. Amazingly, 55% of the subjects reported different answers. Such low correlations at high frequencies are quite representative. Part of the problem comes from respondents' reluctance to admit lack of an attitude. Simply because the surveyor is asking the question, respondents believe that they should have an opinion about it. For example, researchers have shown that large minorities would respond to questions about obscure or even fictitious issues, such as providing opinions on countries that don't exist.

My brief take is that the Freudian model of political expression held by Mr Lennon is faulty. People do not arrive at their opinions autonomously; opinions don't well forth from their bosoms, creating unsustainable neurotic tensions if they are "suppressed". (Presumably when Mr Lennon speaks of people "suppressing" his supporters' opinions, he's referring to getting nasty looks from other people who find those opinions stupid and abhorrent.) Rather, people select and develop their opinions from the range of ideas circulating in public dialogue, as part of the impulse to engage socially. This is not to say that people are empty vessels to be filled by ideological actors with an agenda. They develop their opinions as part of communicative interaction with other people and institutions. But if people are feeling increasingly "desperate", I think it has a lot to do with incentives in the modern media environment that increasingly push political conversations in more desperate and high-pitched directions and reward people for holding and expressing extreme views. Anders Breivik seems like a remarkably non-desperate person who had ample opportunities to voice his opinions, and who developed his convictions in interaction with plenty of other like-minded folks in several countries.