>The authors of a 2017 study in the Journal of Politics revealed that the average Democrat believes that more than 40 percent of Republicans earn more than $250

>The authors of a 2017 study in the Journal of Politics revealed that the average Democrat believes that more than 40 percent of Republicans earn more than $250,000 per year. Meanwhile, Republicans believe that nearly 40 percent of Democrats are LGBTQ. How close are these estimates to reality? Not very. Just 2 percent of Republicans are doing that well financially, and just 6 percent of Democrats are LGBTQ. I think the authors of the study and the author of this article are measuring something completely different than what they think they're measuring. Although the questions are geared towards measuring specific traits (wealthy repub, or LGBTQ dem), I think what the study participants are actually estimating are the support network "power" for those ideals. I would bet if you rephrased the questions to: >"What percentage of Republicans would go along with wealthy Republican leadership decisions?" and >"What percentage of Democrats would go along with LGBTQ leadership decisions?" ...you would get similar percentages to the original questions. I would argue that the participants are naturally estimating the social power of the ideals in question, because it's a more useful metric, and I would make the argument that humans (on average) are really good at estimating that particular thing because it's what we've been optimizing for for the last few thousand years with investments, fashion, war, and innovation.