14 ms·
Small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans
- creatonez 5y agoDisappointed they didn't ask people to estimate number of people who speak a non-english native tongue. I've noticed people way over-estimate the number of Spanish speakers, when in reality the US is quite overwhelmingly monolingual. Curious if this would be reflected in the data.
- jeffbee 5y agoAs I happen to have the new 2020 Census ACS data open in another tab, I'm interested in your estimate of the number of Americans who speak only English.
- donatj 5y agoI’d be interested to know how the estimates compare given aspects of the estimators.
- jl2718 5y agoAll you’re seeing here is a bias toward 50% caused by random clicking.
- adolph 5y agoAnd afterward the bias against the null hypothesis.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- car_analogy 5y agoBy those estimates, 30% live in California, 30% in Texas, and 30% in New York City. That leaves 10% for the entire rest of the US. Maybe the respondents of this poll just didn't care to think for 5 seconds for each answer, rather than revealing some deep-set misperceptions?
- RajT88 5y agoThere probably were relatively few people who responded with those exact figures. My guess is someone who said 30% of the country lived in CA is unlikely to say 30% of the country lives in Texas. Probably there are outliers for each far above 30% that average out in each category. Would love to see a deeper analysis on how the responses break down across questions.
- wnoise 5y agoMedians do improve things -- but not by that much.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoIt's not that they don't think (though they don't). It's that they don't have any kind of a realistic feel for how big various groups are. (Which means they would have to think, instead of just responding by intuition - and they don't think.)
- tedunangst 5y agoThis is not surprising? If I survey how much an appetizer costs, how much an entree costs, how much dessert costs, and how much a dinner costs, the answer to the fourth is not the sum of the first three, or even close. Or ask people how much time they spend sleeping, eating, working, driving to work, etc., and the answer is nowhere close to 24 hours. People simply don't approach these questions from starting with a whole, then considering a portion. Ask people if the government should help group X, yes. Sum up the costs of all their answers, hell no.
- car_analogy 5y ago> This is not surprising? I had assumed most Americans knew the US consisted of 50 states, so their estimates for the population of a single state should have started at 1/50 = 2%. Clearly I was grossly mistaken.
- bagels 5y agoMaybe each person didn't individually answer each question?
- inhumanist 5y ago
- sockaddr 5y agoSome people think 2 out of 10 people are transgender or 2 out of 10 make over 1 million per household? I'm struck by either the lack of awareness of the average person or the methodology of this survey.
- __del__ 5y agowe can safely assume at least 150% of americans are innumerate
- jeffbee 5y agoYeah, let's take the obvious choice and say this survey's methods might not stand up to scrutiny. Pew, a reputable outfit, says that most Americans report having never met someone who is transgender. That obviously can't be reconciled in any sensible way with a belief that 21% of Americans are transgender.
- tedunangst 5y agoThe obvious reconciliation is that "they" all live "over there".
- jquery 5y agoThis is probably true. I'd also add though, how would most Americans even know if they've met someone who's transgender? By definition, the transition phase is transitory.
- lesam 5y agoYou could reconcile it by believing that people just don’t understand percentages.
- kiba 5y agoPerception does not equal reality.
- makeitdouble 5y agoWe’re talking methodology so I think it’s fair to dig deeper. The most obvious point is, how do you tell someone you met is transgender ? The question itself is pretty weird IMHO. It would also be interesting to see how many gay people the Americans responding to the pew survey reported to have met. All in all, these survey are about what people think, it seems pretty hard to come up with control numbers, or validate a methodology as much better than another in meaningful ways. At most we could have different surveys from different groups converging toward the same numbers.
- blamazon 5y agoNote: YouGov is a platform where internet users are paid small amounts to complete surveys. Their primary product is market research and focus group stuff. These type of posts seem to me like (advanced!) marketing content to drive clicks/eyeballs to their platform. It is not exactly an academic study and there may be a selection bias not truly representing a random set of Americans. If you are interested they do disclose methodology at the end of the post. I do like their more entertaining content - such as this: "You’re doing Italian food all wrong, say Italians." [1] I'd like to see more data binned as "Acceptable/Not Acceptable/Divisive to Italians". [1]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2022/02/03/italian-food-crimes https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2...
- KarlKemp 5y agoTheir elections forecasts aren't stellar, but their errors are still far smaller than the magnitude needed to meaningfully change these results.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yxwvut 5y agoThese results are consistent with a group of people answering accurately and honestly mixed in with a large group of people giving random answers to complete the paid survey as quickly as possible (which will naturally drag the averages of each toward 50%, as they report). Wouldn’t wipe my ass with these findings.
- tchock23 5y agoAcademic researchers use these same types of panels for their studies. Sometimes they use even lower quality sample sources since their budgets typically aren’t as high as corporate market researchers. That said, research panels have huge issues across the board. I’d bet a significant majority of ‘Americans’ responding to this study are using vpns to participate from other countries.
- twofornone 5y ago
- ceejayoz 5y agoI was unaware of a “rabid push” to inflate perceptions of Texas’s population, the number of atheists, or how many people make $1M, which are all similarly off.
- yanderekko 5y agoYeah, the fact that all the estimations are between 20% and 76% indicate that there are probably some serious polling issues here. People are probably biased away from choosing extreme outcomes, but.. I just don't believe that there are many people who would say take a 5:1 bet that a randomly-selected member of the US population is trans.
- Adraghast 5y ago> I wonder how much of this has to do with the rabid push for diversity in media, academia, and industry. Less than it has to do with you seeing woke boogeymen lurking in every shadow.
- twofornone 5y agoSure it's anecdote, but when coworkers at my growing startup are openly and seriously talking about "not hiring anymore white guys" in front of the entire c-suite and not losing their jobs, and when in fact I'm worried about losing my job for pushing back against such blatant discrimination, it's no longer a boogeyman. And I'm sure others here can relate.
- KarlKemp 5y agoDiversity is usually about larger groups, i. e. women and Black people. There is no "rabid push" to get transgender people on every company board (of usually 9 or 12). The only "rabid push", with actual force, namely that of law, seems to be about making life harder for these tiny groups, as is happening in "conservative" states. Maybe people can't believe so much legislative hate is directed at a group of people that barely even registers in the census.
- roughly 5y agoHow on earth do you wind up at 20% of the population being transgender, 30% being gay/lesbian, and 30% being bisexual? Even if you combine all those into one group, it just doesn't make any sense on the face of it. The medians are a bit better, at 12, 24, and 24, but either this poll is ridiculously, incredibly badly done, or I've absolutely no idea how to think about my fellow person anymore.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoTFA offers one reason: uncertainty-based rescaling — leads people to systematically overestimate the size of small values and underestimate the size of large values. Basically, when you're not sure what the actual number is, you tend to anchor your guess on 50%, not 0% or 100%.
- mistermann 5y agoI suspect the same way you arrive at all Trump supporters being racist, the problems of the country being the fault of conspiracy theorists, etc: heuristics, combined with a cultural aversion to understanding how the human mind works.
- ceejayoz 5y agoBy guessing, and being asked a bunch of questions without inter-question context. It’s just people going “probably a small number”, being asked to quantify that, and throwing out 20-30% because that feels like one.
- ouid 5y agoLook how tightly the data is clustered around 50%. There are almost no questions for which people did not guess closer to 50% than the correct answer. Did they give people sliders with 50% as the default value? There's a maximum amount I'm willing to fuck with your ui to answer 50 questions. 1 percent is pretty difficult to hit on a slider. If correct answers take more work to enter, then I expect there to be fewer correct answers. There was a deepfake experiment on the site recently asking people to use a slider to estimate their confidence that a particular video, audio or text clip was faked. That used a slider between -100 confidence and 100 confidence, and I really sincerely doubt that anyone spend any amount of time thinking about what number they entered. It was just a way to introduce noise.
- jeffbee 5y agoThe implicit CDF of income is hilarious. Most people are broke ... but of the people who aren't broke, most of them are making a million a year!
- carrolldunham 5y agoI'm not surprised because I learned this myself. It's not just the uneducated 'can't find America on a map' people that you are picturing. My highly educated, policymaking friends, when asked responded with an estimated '30%' of people who are gay and protested that 'it must be' that high because that was their experience of the demographics in their offices at government and NGO sectors.
- bobthechef 5y ago
- bobro 5y agoif i were yougov, i’d take this result as an indication that my methodology for aggregating public opinion is bunk.
- gruez 5y agoIt depends on what you're looking for. For instance, if you want to know what inflation is like is for financial modeling purposes, I certainly wouldn't trust surveys to provide that figure. However, if you're political operative trying to figure out whether "inflation" is going to be an election issue or not, I'd definitely use polls. If true inflation is 3% but everyone thinks it's 20% or whatever, then dismissing it as an issue would be a massive political blunder.
- luxuryballs 5y agoNotable that these hugely incorrect percentages are probably the correct percentages for the representation of minority groups on TV commercials and shows/movies.
- jdavis703 5y agoThis would imply that minority groups make up 126% of TV actors. Even if that number weren’t mathematically impossible, reasonable people would agree that we’re not even close to even say 90% representation of minority groups on US TV.
- umvi 5y agoNot every show, but lots of shows over represent minorities in main cast in what appears to be a conscious DEI effort. For example, Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist gives the impression of high representation of minorities in tech (Sprqpoint is extremely DEI friendly being a woke silicon valley tech company, but even the main character's non-techy neighbor is a black genderfluid woman dating a gay black man). The Dragon Prince gives the impression of high representation of minorities as well (with 1 main character and his kingly father black, 1 main character having gay parents, the rulers of the neighboring country being lesbian, etc). I'm not saying that's wrong, just that minority groups don't need to make up 126% of TV actors in order to be overrepresented in main cast. Heck, even outside of media, look at the Supreme Court. Soon 2/9 justices will be black, which is 22% of the court - an over representation of the black population. Again, not that I have a problem with that, just that DEI efforts can cause high visibility groups (such as a TV show's main cast) to be overrepressented by minorities.
- Zircom 5y agoThe Dragon Prince is set in a fantasy world, so not really a fair comparison. It's possible that in their universe the chances of being black or homosexual is different than ours, and that the onscreen representation of those minorities is perfectly proportional. So trying to compare the two is a moot point.
- 5y ago
- grecy 5y agoMany comments here are criticizing folks for not using critical thinking and logic to reason about answers, but they're missing the point. The point isn't that people are so badly informed about the state of their own country, it's why are they so badly informed, and what is going to be done to improve it.
- makeitdouble 5y agoA lot of comments are coming down on the result as “the methodology must be wrong”, and I feel they are expecting people to give mostly reasonable answers. Except the target of the survey is perception, so just a mental image disconnected with any reality. Perception is usually wildly off, in particular when affecting political positions, and as noted in the article that’s not the first survey to come up with similar results. The Ipsos one [0] has French guessing 30% of population as Muslims (vs 7.5 for reality) for instance. [0] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/perceptions-are-not-reality-what-world-gets-wrong https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/perceptions-are-not-reality-what...
- tedunangst 5y agoYeah, kinda weird that everybody is so focused on inconsistencies. These questions directly relate to underlying assumptions for support for various public policies. Does HN think people have coherent views on public policies?
- tobyjsullivan 5y agoWe are all biased toward thinking we personally hold coherent views. We’re also biased toward thinking we’re average in our capabilities (amongst our in-groups, at least). So it would stand to reason that those biases compose to believing our entire in-group, on average, holds coherent views. We’re rarely wise enough to estimate our own margins of error, nor self-aware enough to know our own actual capabilities relative to others.
- lelandfe 5y agoExpecting 30% of the US to live in NYC does strike me as particularly wild hah
- TulliusCicero 5y agoThe interesting thing is that the equivalent is actually true for Japan and South Korea. The metro populations of Tokyo and Seoul are enormous relative to national population.
- Freeboots 5y agoNot American, but i was surprised by atheism at only 3%. Im aware that USA is strongly religious, but wow.
- DangitBobby 5y agoAs an American, I (roughly correctly) estimated Christians to be about 65%, and my wife and I both estimated athiests to be about 20%... I guess "athiest" is too strong of a term here, and most people (self included) would more accurately desribe themselves as non-religious or unaffiliated.
- qgin 5y agoAtheism is a dirty word in America. Way more people have no particular religious beliefs, but they’re turned off by the word.
- pbuzbee 5y agoHowever, 29% of Americans are non-religious: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/ https://www.pewforum.org/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-a...
- izzydata 5y agoI'm not even sure why atheism has a name. It doesn't feel like a category that anyone would identify with. Lots of people are simply not religious which is more like being null in the religion category while atheism is like -1.
- vannevar 5y agoThe "all you see is all there is" fallacy is probably in play here; if respondents were asked about each minority individually, simply the fact that other minorities not named didn't come readily to mind could account for the obviously poor math here. If all the minorities were listed and the respondents were asked to estimate all of them at the same time, you'd see a dramatically different result. I suspect that similar over estimations would happen if you exposed a test subject to a chart showing the relative proportion of ten different quantities (eg, a chart partitioned into different sized regions, distinctly colored) then asked them to estimate one of the quantities without referring back to the chart. It's not so much an estimation problem as it is a limited working memory problem (the old "seven, plus or minus two" rule).
- sct202 5y agoI wonder if they stuck the default position of the slider at 50% and that caused such high estimates. There was a time during early covid where I did a bunch of research surveys to kill time, and there were quite a few where the I was questioning if the intent was to bias the result or if it was accidental with how they set up the survey form.
- trynumber9 5y agoI strongly suspect methodological error until poll results are replicated with other methodologies. The results trend toward the center which seems an unlikely result in many categories which are exclusive and widely known to be 'minority' (e.g. religion and sexual orientation).
- cperciva 5y agoLeaving aside the methodological issues, this is a general phenomenon not isolated to Americans. In my corner of the world (Vancouver, Canada) many students recently expressed outrage that, over the course of a 4 year degree, they hadn't even had a single Black instructor. Based on the census-reported prevalence of Black individuals in the community, they would need to be significantly overrepresented in University teaching in order for most students to take courses taught by them!
- exdsq 5y agoThat sort of level of critical thinking really should be the outcome of all degrees too, tbh!
- cperciva 5y agoAlas, it's not just the students who struggle in that respect. Over half of the faculty supported them.
- commandlinefan 5y agoYou’re lucky they didn’t call for the firing of the people who read the census numbers, too.
- cperciva 5y agoI'm an alumni representative on the University's academic governing body (Senate) and was the only person in the room who receives neither grades nor a paycheque from the University. In light of that, I have a standing offer to speak on behalf of any Senator who sends me written remarks and does not feel safe (either physically or career-wise) being publicly identified with their opinions. I'm sad to say that this offer has been utilized.
- switchbak 5y agoThat's a sad state of affairs, thank you for doing the right thing and speaking up for those who have been chilled into silence.
- opportune 5y agoI wonder how much of this is innumeracy rather than mis estimation. What I mean is that people may actually intuitively understand more accurate proportions, but due to lack of education they don’t understand how to convert that to percentages. That may not even be due to not understanding the math itself (ie 1/5 is 20% and 1/100 is 1%) but perhaps not linking the two concepts, so they don’t even think in terms of their intuition when asked to give a percentage. Part of the reason why I suspect this is that even the smallest groups are measured at close to 20%. But I bet the average person knows the groups are rare or very rare, just not what 20% actually means in terms of rarity
- porknubbins 5y agoI think this is a lot of the explanation. What always surprises me is just how innumerate many people can be with little obvious impact on their day to day life. Also they are unable to do basic sanity checks like when I go in public how many of these types do I see etc. Also they must not have any other knowledge of demographic statistics to rely on.
- jquery 5y agoNot sure what to make of this: "Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%."
- prirun 5y agoIt seems to me that if BA thought they were more than 50% of the population, then of course they would be outraged if they aren't getting at least 50% representation in executive positions, TV & movie actors, government officials, etc. Even if they got 14% representation (doubt they do, but I don't know), they would still be outraged. This seems like an unbelievably huge issue that needs to be solved.
- ashwagary 5y agoI noticed YouGov data is wrong in at least 1 area, the percentage of Native Americans is much higher than 1%, they seem to have wrongly excluded a large % of the black population that is native to America but were part of a systematic paper genocide carried out by the US government. If there is one obvious mistake, I wonder what else they got wrong or used the wrong criteria for.
- nostromo 5y agoI saw polls during Covid where Americans estimated that 10% of the population had died of Covid. It’s hard to know what’s going on with these polls. Perhaps it’s simply mathematical illiteracy.
- prirun 5y agoIMO, a factor in why people overestimate minority groups is that the news media (and media in general) are almost always discussing one minority group or the other these days. It's in your face all the time. I'm in one minority group myself, and I'm kinda sick of hearing about it!
- civilized 5y agoSome context on the pollster: if you watch the poll tracking charts on FiveThirtyEight, YouGov is the one that generates lots of insane outliers.
- rossdavidh 5y agoI believe that people overestimate the percentage of the population for many small minority groups. I do not, however, believe that the mean estimate for transgender population is 21%. I don't believe they think 30% live in NYC, 30% in Texas, and 32% in California, leaving 8% of the population living anywhere else. The lowest estimate is 20%, and the highest estimate is 65% (even though several categories actually included well over 80%). It looks rather like a bunch of people said 50% to everything, skewing the means towards the middle.
- draw_down 5y ago
- caffeine 5y agoI think a lot of the inaccuracy is just innumeracy. People have a hard time conceptualising 1% or 99%. The estimations range from 20% on the low end to 60% on the high end, which are numbers that easily come to mind and have relevance in reality (like you have probably cut something into 5 pieces before, but not into 100 or 1000). You get the same effect if you ask people to estimate the likelihood of dying in very improbable events like school shootings or lightning strikes.
- w-j-w 5y ago
- alaserm 5y agoWow...these small loud groups make the other majority of americans live by their rules, e.g jewish demanding removal of christmas trees from public places, gays/lesbians changing education programs
- harpiaharpyja 5y agoThere are many factors here, for sure. But I think a big one is just that most people don't have a good grasp of small percentages. I think humans are more naturally inclined to ratios and proportions, and not percentages. I've found that people who aren't accustomed to how a logarithmic scale works likely won't have a good feel for what the extremities of the percentage range actually represent.
- YokoZar 5y agoOne "real number" is actually rather far off - survey respondents estimated that 49% of people "own a home" but the article implies the actual number is 65%. 65% is the oft-cited "home ownership rate", however that is defined as the fraction of occupied homes with an owner in them. Move back in with your parents after college? Rent from a live-in landlord? Congrats, you "own a home" according to this absurd statistic. A much more reasonable number would be something like the percent of adults who either own a home or are married to someone who does.
- redsparrow 5y agoIf you haven't read the article yet you can test yourself. (I've copied and pasted the questions in random order. I don't know how they were presented to the original participants.) "If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults..." * Are left-handed * Have at least a high school degree * Are Hispanic * Are Catholic * Have an advanced degree * Have a household income over $500,000 * Are vegan or vegetarian * Are first-generation immigrants * Have a passport * Have a household income over $100,000 * Live in Texas * Are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 * Live in New York City * Own a smartphone * Are Jewish * Are Muslim * Have flown on a plane * Are a military veteran * Own a gun * Are Asian * Have a driver's license * Own a house * Are Native American * Have a household income over $1 million * Are married * Own a car * Are members of a union * Are atheists * Have at least one child * Have a household income over $50,000 * Are Democrats * Are transgender * Are gay or lesbian * Are obese * Are Black * Are bisexual * Have a pet * Have read a book in the past year * Are white * Live in California * Voted in the 2020 election * Are Republicans * Have a household income over $25,000 * Are Christian * Have at least a college degree
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]