This is approximately the 100,333rd episode in the insanely popular CCP series, "Wanna see more data? Just ask!," the game in which commentators compete for world-wide recognition and fame by proposing amazingly clever hypotheses that can be tested by re-analyzing data collected in one or another CCP study. For "WSMD?, JA!" rules and conditions (including the mandatory release from defamation claims), click here.

After taking a look at “yesterday™’s post, loyal reader & professional science communicator @TamarHaspel asked if there was comparable data available for risks posed by nuclear power.

After only mild encouragement, she also gamely (this is a game, after all) ventured her own prediction about what the data would show:

Well? Is this what the data show? No, not really:

She didn’t nail it, but her surmise was a very logical and defensible one.

Here’s some data that might have helped @Tamar formulate a hypothesis even closer to the observed result:

Basically, for nearly all perceived risks that are free of partisan disagreement, there is a general bipartisan downward trend in relation to the Ordinary Science Intelligence assessment.

Nuclear power risk perceptions are not totally free of partisan disagreement:

But the degree of partisan disagreement is small compareD to the degree of disagreement one can observe for climate change, say, or fracking or private gun ownership.

Knowing that, one might have conjectured that we’d observe downward trends of nuclear power risk perceptions but at different rates for respondents of different political outlooks.

Or maybe not!

Anyway, this was a very worthwhile game of WSMD? JA! For sure @TamarHaspel has earned a prize from the CCP gift catalog.