In practice, projection of historical trends into the future could therefore be a feasible approach to forecasting public opinion. Previous research has shown that opinion change in the US often shows long-lasting trends. To assess the predictive ability of the moral argument theory, we will compare the accuracy of its predictions with the accuracy of atheoretic predictions based on historical data. It follows that when we use moral arguments to forecast opinion shifts, we should be able to forecast shifts over longer time spans with greater accuracy than shifts over short time spans. Given sufficient time to work, the accumulated impact of moral arguments may dominate over the time-limited impact of specific events. However, whereas generally acceptable moral arguments are assumed to exert a constant force on public opinion, the impact of singular events are limited in time. It considers only the effect of moral arguments and ignores any effects of singular events, such as statements by the political elite and supreme court decisions. Another reason is that the theory is limited. One reason is that opinion polls have measurement errors. Note that such predictions can never be perfectly accurate. Specifically, we will use measurements of argument advantage to predict how public opinion in the United States will move on a wide range of moral issues. The goal of this project is to test if the moral argument theory is also capable of predicting future opinions. The validity of the theory is supported by recent studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, in which recent historical opinion trends for a large number of specific moral issues have been predicted by measures of which opinion on each issue has the argument advantage. The fourth assumption, that opinion change from argument exposure is linked to how acceptable that kind of argument is to a person, is supported by experimental studies. The third assumption, that there is general agreement about which kinds of arguments can be used to justify which opinion on an issue, is supported by multiple studies conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Israel. According to these studies, conservatives find all kinds of arguments relevant while liberals only find those kinds of arguments relevant that are generally acceptable (harm, violence, fairness and liberty). Extensive studies have asked people how relevant these kinds of arguments are for their moral judgements. Moral foundations theory distils moral arguments into just a few kinds. The second assumption, about the acceptability of different kinds of arguments, is supported by moral foundations theory. The first assumption, that people are exposed to arguments on moral issues, is supported by media content analyses. There is empirical evidence for each of the four assumptions behind the theory. This verbal argument is also supported by computational models. Specifically, the higher the argument advantage of an opinion is, the faster it should gain in popularity. Under these assumptions, the theory concludes that by measuring which opinion on an issue has the argument advantage, and how large the advantage is, we should be able to predict in which direction, and how fast, public opinion will change. People are more likely to change opinion when confronted with an argument of a kind that is relevant to their moral judgements.
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