What Must My Interest in Politics Be If I Just Told You "I Don't Know"?

How much people think they follow what's going on in government and public affairs depends upon the context in which they are asked the question. If asked immediately after difficult questions about what they know of their congressman's record, they are much less likely to think they pay attention to public affairs than if they are asked, first, how interested they are in such matters. More important, data from two independent experiments show that this context effect cannot be eliminated, or significantly reduced, by interposing a buffer of questions on unrelated topics between the items that are known to affect one another. The authors discuss the psychological significance of these findings and their implications for survey research.