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One of my favorite examples: Americans trying to estimate the size of minority groups.
Americans routinely think that 20% of Americans are making $1mm a year, are transgender, are Jewish, are Muslim, are East Asian, live in NYC, are Bisexual, live in Texas. The proportions they attribute to tiny minorities are literally impossible to square with each other, unless you assume some huge number of trans millionaire bisexual Chinese Jews splitting their time between Dallas and Manhattan.
While they routinely think that only two thirds of Americans own a car, have flown on a plane, or received a high school diploma
Whites, homeowners, Christians all also lose significant percentage points in estimation.
What's most fascinating to me is that Conservative Republicans, who can broadly speaking be assumed to be more pro-white and anti-gay and anti-Muslim, are more likely to vastly overestimate the number of gay people and Black people and Muslims in the country, while actual Black people gay people and Muslims tend to underestimate it.
People are innumerate.
This study has a problem that it takes average instead of median. If 80% of people give correct answer (i'm not saying they do, but consider if for a moment) and 15% people answer 50% and 5% people troll and answer the furthest of truth, you get results like this. Yes, people are innumerate but if we take median instead of mean it's much less shocking.
Do you have any evidence that is the case, or just speculative? I have to discount the trolling hypothesis, it's kind of evidence free.
At any rate I'm not sure it would really make me feel much better to say 15% of people are super duper innumerate."
The general point of my comment is that for such polls, mean and median are quite different things.
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Conservative republicans know they live in a bubble and that proportions of various minorities are higher elsewhere, but usually don’t understand how the proportions shake out. Conservatives in the south usually don’t grasp that blacks are overrepresented in their surrounds but gays are underrepresented, they think gay numbers must be similar to black numbers from the way the media keeps talking about it.
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It is worth noting that the consistent pattern here is that people push percentages towards 50% - suggesting that it is pure innumeracy and not some kind of politically or socially driven bias.
I think the most simple answer is that it is pure innumeracy, and numbers like 20%, 50%, 80%, etc. are just proxies for "a few", "some", "a lot" etc and there's only a tenuous grasp as to whether or how this translates to material reality
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Or it's both innumeracy and political bias, otherwise we wouldn't see significant differences in estimations between racial or political groups.
For example, people are liberal are more likely to overestimate police killings compared to people that lean conservative:
https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
It's important to note that those estimations are numbers on aggregate, and if you dissect the data you may see additional patterns. Of course, the pattern could also just be noise.
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Maybe it speaks to negativity bias. If white conservatives feel negative about gays or blacks they may be more likely to exaggerate their numbers, and if you’re black you may underestimate your numbers because you feel negative about being a small minority. People just pay more attention to the features of the world that are of negative emotional valence. You see this on every end of the political spectrum, and it feeds extremism especially. This may be why political radicals are more likely to be highly neurotic individuals.
No. I asked the question about of percent of gays to people in Russia and they do not give horribly inflated estimates. I asked this question to some Americans in Russia, and they give inflated estimates.
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To me, this speaks to the size of each group's mainstream influence (or the percent at which they are represented in media) rather than their actual size. Factoring that in makes this sort of mistake far more understandable. They don't know the raw numbers, but they see the representation distribution throughout the mainstream, which is an inaccurate depiction of the country's true demographic. On the other hand, minorities may recognize the representation they get in media, but then they walk outside, or go to the grocery store, or church, or anywhere else in public and see that they, in fact, are still a minority.
Minorities tend to live in bubbles, though, where their own kind are overrepresented.
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Indeed. The list looks like the distribution of features in Hollywood movies and Netflix shows. NYC and California over represented. Rich people over represented. Similarly for veterans. And then car owners underrepresented. All are typical show tropes.
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Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.
If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.
I think the disconnect is that representation advocates don't want proportional representation of the general population demographics — what they want is aspirational representation for every minority. The hope is for every black (etc. etc.) child to have just as many black characters in fiction to daydream about being when they grow up that a white child has. From that framing, no single demographic can be "over"-represented until each slice has exactly as many performers as every other.
(The above is an explanation, not an endorsement. Mind you, I would actually quite like to see Idris Elba as James Bond, but more in a race-blind-casting this-guy-is-really-good kind of way. Besides he's probably too old now.)
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I would excuse innumeracy to some degree. Knowing specific percentages or numbers has very little value outside of being a factoid to recite. There is value in having an idea of what category of the following something goes in: None, almost none, few, some, about half, a majority, a vast majority, almost everyone, everyone. But even then, off-by-one category in some circumstances I don't think is a major failure.
But there's some examples where I have a hard time making that excuse, like in the OP the examples they mention of unarmed blacks killed by police and population size of Israel, you would presume that if something is a huge crusade for these people they would at least have an idea of the order of magnitude of their problem. Eneasz Brodski probably only had this opinion about men and women in sports in passing, if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster.
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