The New York Times’ website has a really cool interactive feature in which you can indicate your own opinion on Osama Bin Laden’s demise on a two-dimensional plot, and simultaneously see other people’s reactions. The two axes of the plot represent negative vs. positive emotions, and whether you think OBL’s death is a “significant turning point in the war on terror.” At the time of writing, the results show that most of the people are in the quadrant “positive/significant,” and that within this quadrant, there is also a strong correlation between positiveness and significance. Outside this quadrant, there is much less of a correlation. I guess this makes some sense, assuming that most people are against terrorism: the more you think the killing helped prevent terrorism, the better you feel about it. This would then reflect a rather utilitarian view on when it is justified to kill an (unarmed) man.
Of course you could also wonder about the effects of knowing other people’s responses before you can see your own. Generally, however, I think it is a nice application of “interactive statistics” and data visualization.
(By the way, I also wonder where the square blocks come from. It seems people are free to click anywhere on the map. Maybe they are some artifacts of the visualization method, or do they emerge spontaneously?)
