Misreading the Public on Torture

The results of a 2008 survey show that a public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.

Political scientist John Sides reports on this finding from a 2008 survey:

The survey's authors found that (as excerpted by Sides):

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack. ... But this view was a misperception…we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency … even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency.

They attributed this confusion of beliefs to the so-called false consensus effect studied by cognitive psychologists, in which people tend to assume that others agree with them. For example:

The 30% who say that torture can “sometimes” be justified believe that 62% of Americans do as well, and think that another 8% “often” approve of torture.

But maybe these people were just ahead of their time:

A public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.

I'd be interested in how this breaks down by partisanship. Is this related to the idea that we now see little public opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars because liberal Democrats are the political/ideological group that are most antiwar, and their opposition is defused because of their general support for the Obama administration? Or maybe something else is going on; I'd be interested in seeing more.