Weekly: 10.3.26

October 2, 2026 Weekly Roundup The latest findings from Pew Research Center · Subscribe ↗ As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, there is growing interest in using it to stand in for real respondents in public opinion surveys. To learn more about this method, we replicated three human surveys from our American Trends Panel with AI respondents. These synthetic surveys did a poor job of reproducing the real results and were especially error-prone for some subgroups, including Republicans and Black adults. The share of people who believe social media is bad for democracy has increased significantly in recent years in most countries where trend data is available. Views remain particularly negative in the U.S., where 64% of adults say social media is bad for democracy. That’s unchanged since we last asked four years ago. Most Americans identify as Republicans or Democrats. But many don’t, and instead “lean” toward one party or the other. For these leaners, opposition to the other party’s policies is more of a motivating factor than support for the policies of the party they lean toward. Between 2015 and 2025, the share of purchases Americans make with cash has fallen, from 33% to 14%. Credit cards now account for the highest share (34%), followed by debit cards (31%). About two-thirds of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder and see it as morally justified for this type of offense. Still, a majority say capital punishment does not deter people from committing serious crimes. From our research