National Survey of Philosophical Viewpoints | March 2026
- Carneades.org
- Mar 29
- 8 min read
Earlier this month, Carneades.org conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans on a range of philosophical topics, assessing the public's views on ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and more. The survey was conducted online via random device engagement, posing 20 questions to 1,000 randomly selected Americans. The results will be released over the coming weeks in a series of videos from ExPhi, each accompanied by a blog post here (the first one can be found here).
Data like these are a public good that can help us all understand how normal people view important philosophical questions. Our goal is to put out more surveys like this in the future, but we need your help! Have you ever wanted to ask a philosophical question to a representative sample of Americans? Have you ever been curious about how normal people see questions that are important to philosophers? You now have the chance to get your question on our next nationally representative survey! We need around $2,500 to conduct another survey, hopefully in the next few months. Visit our Patreon page to find out more. Here's how you can help:
Raw Data $10: If you want access to the raw data from the survey we just finished, it is available! You can use it to run and publish whatever analyses you want, just 1) don't publish the raw data yourself and 2) make sure to give credit to Carneades.org. We'll even throw in the data from our pre-survey of 100 people.
Likert Statement $30: Want to see how much Americans agree or disagree with a certain statement? For just $30, you can add a statement to our Likert question, where participants will respond to it with Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree. The statement must be about philosophy, less than 150 characters, and safe for work. We'll include the raw data from the next survey.†
Multiple Choice Question $150: Want to design and ask your own multiple choice question? You can have up to 1,000 characters in the question and up to 500 characters in each of the answers. Only up to 10 answers are allowed. The question must be about philosophy and safe for work. We'll include the raw data from the next survey. We will even throw in a Likert statement (as described above) and the raw data from the next survey for free!†
We reserve the right to edit any statement for grammar, spelling, or to clarify any philosophical ideas for the respondents. We also reserve the right to reject any statements, but will give a full refund for any that are rejected.
Methodology and Demographics
In the upcoming videos and blogs we will dig into the philosophical results of the survey as broken down by various demographics. This blog will serve as a baseline of the demographics of the respondents.
The survey was conducted online using Pollfish using their random device engagement survey methodology. Pollfish's methodology is used by thousands of companies, organizations, and governments to assess public opinion around the world. For more information on how Pollfish conducts their surveys, see this article.
The survey consisted of 15 philosophical multiple choice questions, 1 Likert question with 15 statements, 3 demographic questions (in addition to the underlying demographic data provided by Pollfish), and 1 validation question. The survey was completed by 1000 respondents, with a 43.7% completion rate (i.e. 43.7% of people who were offered to complete the survey did), which is average for online surveys.
The results of the survey are weighted by age and gender to ensure a representative sample using post-stratification. Other demographics included in the survey include: income, net worth, religion, education, race/ethnicity, languages spoken, parental status, political party, and region of the country.
Of the respondents, 44.4% were male, 55.6% were female. In terms of race, 80% of respondents identified as white, 8% identified as Black, and 6.5% identified as Hispanic. Regarding political party, 34.7% of participants identified as Democrats, 34.1% of participants identified as Republicans, and 28% of participants identified as Independents. Respondents hailed from 49 states, with 20% coming from the Northeast, 24.9% from the Midwest, 36% from the South, and 16% from the West.
In terms of income, 12% had a household income over $150,000, 24% had an income from $90,000 to $150,000, 21% had an income between $60,000 and $90,000, 23% had an income between $30,000 and $60,000, and 19% had an income lower than $30,000 (each of these ranges roughly corresponds to the quintiles of the American population: Lower, Lower Middle, Middle, Upper Middle, and Upper income). In terms of religion, 66% identified as some kind of Christian (30% identified as Protestant, 24% identified as Catholic, and 12% identified as Other Christian). The next largest group identified as having no religion 26% (14% identified as nothing particular, 6% identified as atheists, and 5% identified as agnostic). Finally, 7% identified as some other religion ( 3% Jewish, 0.8% Muslim, 0.8, Buddhist, 0.4% Hindu, and 2% other).
Finally, participants were asked the highest level of philosophy that they had taken. A plurality (47.5%) had never taken a philosophy class before, 8.8% had taken a K-12 philosophy course, 31.2% had taken a undergraduate or graduate level philosophy course, 6.6% had an undergraduate degree (major or minor) in philosophy, and 5.9% had a Masters or PhD in philosophy.
Philosophy Pays Off
While we are waiting to gives you some of the substantive results on the actual philosophy questions for future blogs, we couldn't resist trying to answer an important question with these data. Does a philosophy degree pay off? We initially gathered data on whether participants had any philosophy degrees to use as a possible control on our other regressions, but it has the knock-on effect of being able to look at what kind of income boost one can expect from a philosophy degree. Note that these data can't show causation, but they can make you doubt the myth that all philosophy majors are impoverished.
As we can see from the graph above, over half of people with a philosophy degree are either upper income or upper middle income, while over half of people without a philosophy degree are low or lower middle income. This might give you some initial ideas about the usefulness of a philosophy degree, but it also might be a feature of how difficult it is for lower income Americans to access higher education at all (all the more reason for a great free resource for learning philosophy online, like Carneades.org).
In order to answer these questions with a bit more rigor, we will run some regressions. Is getting a philosophy degree vs having no degree at all have an association with higher income prospects? Our data seems to suggest yes. Using a simple linear regression, going from not having a philosophy degree to having one, increases you annual income by $23,470 on average.*** However, this might be a result of age or education level overall. If we control for your education level (having a bachelor's degree or not), the size of the effect decreases (i.e. some of the $23,470 was having any degree), but does not disappear. Controlling for the binary of whether you have at least a bachelor's degree, a philosophy degree gets you $10,350 on average.* If we add in a variable for age (as well as age squared since age's impact on income is often parabolic, i.e. younger and older people earn less), we still see a significant result, with a philosophy degree netting you an average increase to your annual income of $14,040.***
Income= β0 + β1* Phil | Income= β0 + β1*Phil + β2* Bach | Income= β0 + β1*Phil + β2* Bach + β3*Age + β4*Age*Age | |
Philosophy Degree? (0/1) | 0.23*** (0.041) | 0.14*** (0.039) | 0.1754*** (0.039) |
Bachelors or up? (0/1) | 0.34*** (0.027) | 0.3087*** (0.028) | |
Age (#) | 0.0231*** (0.004) | ||
Age^2 (#) | -0.0002*** (0.0000406) | ||
Constant | 0.28*** (0.016) | 0.13*** (0.018) | -0.42*** (0.096) |
We can look instead at your income bracket (upper class, middle class etc.), using a linear probability model. Without controlling for anything, you are 23% more likely to be Upper or Upper middle class (i.e. above the 60th percentile in income) if you have a philosophy degree than if you don't.*** Controlling for whether you at least have a bachelor's degree, this drops to a 14% increase in your chances of being over the 60th percentile for income.*** If you include age and age squared, a philosophy degree increases you changes of being upper or upper middle class by 18%.***
For the nitty gritty, see the table below, which is the result of a linear probability model run on Rich (a binary variable where 1 is over the 60th percentile of income ($90,000) and 0 is below).
Rich = β0 + β1* Phil | Rich = β0 + β1*Phil + β2* Bach | Rich = β0 + β1*Phil + β2* Bach + β3*Age + β4*Age*Age | |
Philosophy Degree? (0/1) | 0.23*** (0.041) | 0.14*** (0.039) | 0.1754*** (0.039) |
Bachelors or up? (0/1) | 0.34*** (0.027) | 0.3087*** (0.028) | |
Age (#) | 0.0231*** (0.004) | ||
Age^2 (#) | -0.0002*** (0.0000406) | ||
Constant | 0.28*** (0.016) | 0.13*** (0.018) | -0.42*** (0.096) |
Can you know that these stats are true, or will happen to you if you get a philosophy degree? Of course not! As a philosophical skeptic, I don't believe in the external world, let alone the ability of correlation to imply causation (even scientific realists don't think correlation implies causation). It could be that rich people feel more able to take philosophy courses than poor people because they are less concerned about getting a "useful" degree. However they should make you doubt anyone telling you that a philosophy degree is worthless. For more on what to do with a philosophy degree, check out this video series:
Can We Trust These Conclusions?
This does bring us to an important question. Can we actually trust any of the conclusions we draw from these data? As a philosophical skeptic, I don't know if we can know anything, but you can trust these results as much as any other similar survey. The methodology is similar to what you might see in election polling or market research, rigorous enough to answer questions, but far from certain. We included two validation questions (right or wrong questions to ensure participants were fully reading the information, and all participants answered them correctly.
For those of you who don't have a background in statistics, and are wondering how 1,000 people can be representative of the whole country, the answer is that there's a good chance they are, if we rely on a few assumptions. Having 1,000 randomly selected respondents from all across the country increases the likelihood that the actual result (e.g. the real share of the population that believes in some philosophical position X) is the same as the measured result (what we will publish here). Saying that we have 99% confidence in a particular value + or - 3% means that statisticians expect that 99% of the time the actual share will fall between + 3% or -3% of the measured result. The higher the sample size, the more confidence we can have. Having 1,000 respondents is well over the number we need to have very high statistical confidence in our results. The further we cut the data (by gender, age, income etc.), and the closer two results are to each other, the less confidence we will have, and most statisticians would be skeptical of drawing too many conclusions with confidence of a sub-group less than 100.
There are lots of reasons to further doubt these results. There are all kinds of statistical biases (non-respondent bias, measurement bias, sampling bias, multicollinearity, heteroskedasicity) that we can correct for with varying degrees of accuracy. There are also deeper philosophical concerns like the problem of induction, the new riddle of induction, the problem of underdetermination, and more, which would lead us to doubt any science. However many of these biases plague any study or survey conducted. I don't claim to know any results in this study are true, but I expect they are just as likely to be accurate as any other opinion poll you would find.
Notes
Absolute income values are calculated as the midpoint of the ranges used.
*Significant at the p < 0.1 level
**Significant at the p < 0.05 level
*** Significant at the p < 0.01 level
† We reserve the right to reject any question, but will issue a refund for any questions that are rejected. We also reserve the right to make any minor grammatical or clarificatory edits to a statement or question. Questions and statements will not be fielded until we have raised enough money to fund a full survey.
Here is the full questionnaire. Raw data can be purchased on Patreon.
How to Cite this Report:
Carneades (2026). National Survey of Philosophical Viewpoints | March 2026. Experimental Philosophy. https://www.carneades.org/post/national-survey-of-philosophical-viewpoints-march-2026
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