As people get older, do they become more racist, sexist, and homophobic? To find out, you could use data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks questions like:

• Do you think there should be laws against marriages between Blacks/African-Americans and whites?
• Should a man who admits[mfn]If you find the wording of this question problematic, remember that it was written in 1970 and reflects mainstream views at the time. It persists because, in order to support time series analysis, the GSS generally avoids changing the wording of questions.[/mfn] that he is a homosexual be allowed to teach in a college or university, or not?
• Tell me if you agree or disagree with this statement: Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.

If you plot the answers to these questions as a function of age, you find that older people are, in fact, more racist, sexist, and homophobic than younger people. But that’s not because they are old; it’s because they were born, raised, and educated during a time when large fractions of the population were racist, sexist homophobes.

In other words, it’s primarily a cohort effect, not an age effect. We can see that if we group respondents by birth cohort and plot their responses by age. Here are the results for the first question:

The circle markers show the proportion of respondents who got this question wrong (no other way to put it); the lines show local regressions through the markers.

The dashed gray line shows the overall trend, if we don’t group by cohort. Sure enough, when this question was asked between 1972 and 2002, older respondents were substantially more likely to support laws against marriage between people of difference races.

But when we group by decade of birth, we see:

• A cohort effect: people born later are less racist.
• A period effect: within every cohort, people get less racist over time.

The results are similar for the second question:

If you thought the racism was bad, get a load of the homophobia!

But again, all birth cohorts became more tolerant over time (even the people born in the 19-aughts, though it doesn’t look it). And again, there is no age effect; people do not become homophobic as they age.

They don’t get more sexist, either:

Simpson’s Paradox

These are all examples of Simpson’s paradox, where the trend in every group goes in one direction, and the overall trend goes in the other direction. It’s called a paradox because many people find it counterintuitive at first. But once you have seen a few examples, like the ones I wrote about this, this, and this previous article, it gets to be less of a surprise.

And if you pay attention, it can be a hint that there is something wrong with your model. In this case, it is a symptom that we are looking at the data the wrong way. If we suspect that the changes we see are due to cohort and period, rather than age, we can check by plotting over time, rather than age, like this:

Every cohort is less racist than its predecessor, every cohort gets less racist over time, and the overall trend goes in the same direction, so Simpson’s paradox is resolved.

Or maybe it persists in a weaker form: the overall trend is steeper than the trend in any of the cohorts, because in addition to the cohort effect and the period effect, we also see the effect of generational replacement.

This article is part of a series where I search the GSS for examples of Simpson’s paradox. More coming soon!