You can see why liberal America is so obsessed with the LGBT community. You saw the unhinged reactions to Florida’s so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay' bill, even though such a word isn’t even mentioned in the legislation. That was a ridiculous reaction from the Left, but maybe it’s partially grounded in the fact that they think this community is larger than it is in America. It’s a problem with everyone. Americans are a pile of hot garbage when it comes to estimating the size of minorities and other subgroups. I mean, it’s really bad.
Apparently, America is a nation that's nearly a quarter transgender, an equal proportion of the population are millionaires, 29 percent are Asian, and 41 percent are black. Those are some of the wild assumptions. Only one percent of the US population is transgender, only six percent of the population is Asian, and blacks only make up 12 percent. What is going on here?
People are really bad at estimating America's demographicshttps://t.co/mkT3b8vMwR pic.twitter.com/DDFC59uYYH
— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) March 16, 2022
Via YouGov:
Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.
If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.
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%.
Although there is some question-by-question variability, the results from our survey show that inaccurate perceptions of group size are not limited to the types of socially charged group divisions typically explored in similar studies: race, religion, sexuality, education, and income. Americans are equally likely to misestimate the size of less widely discussed groups, such as adults who are left-handed. While respondents estimated that 34% of U.S. adults are left-handed, the real estimate lies closer to 10-12%. Similar misperceptions are found regarding the proportion of American adults who own a pet, have read a book in the past year, or reside in various cities or states. This suggests that errors in judgment are not due to the specific context surrounding a certain group.
All those reasons make sense, but the latter portion is what interests me. The entertainment media is flooded with this ‘woke’ nonsense but can easily lead to people overestimating a variety of groups. Liberals are also a super minority with barely 25 percent identifying as such, though they think they’re the majority. Liberals’ penchant for being condescending, snobby, and overall shrill when it comes to people pushing back on their terrible ideas also doesn’t bode well for increasing their ranks. And maybe a good part of these misconceptions is our fault, those in media who have a duty to breakdown facts and figures but don’t if they scare us from a certain agenda item. COVID is a prime example as people dying with the virus were counted as a fatality from the virus. If you get shot and killed but also had COVID, you died from the bullet, not the virus. We’ve known the death toll was shoddy from the start. Only now, as foreign and domestic crises engulf the media’s attention did the health folks announce these revisions. The timing is not lost on anyone.
It's a problem that’s not unfixable, however.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member