Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The People.
Heads up: The Secret pod is going to be a little different this week. Don’t worry—this isn’t going to be a regular thing. It’s just that Sarah and I wanted to talk with Tim about something. The show should be out soon.
1. Perceptions
Yesterday Jemele Hill recirculated a study YouGov did in 2022 about the gaps between people’s perceptions and reality.
YouGov asked a series of questions on “What percentage of Americans do you think are [fill in the blank]?” with the [blank] being all sorts of qualities: black, gay, Christian, left-handed, own a passport, etc.
The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:
Transgender: 21 percent
Muslim: 27 percent
Jewish: 30 percent
Black: 41 percent
Live in New York City: 30 percent
Gay or lesbian: 30 percent
We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?
Not to be crass, but if a third of the population is gay/lesbian then where are all the kids coming from?
If a quarter of the country is Muslim and a third is Jewish, then mosques plus synagogues would outnumber churches. Does anyone see more mosques and synagogues than churches as they drive around?
If 40 percent of the country is black then wouldn’t there be a lot more black people in Congress? I mean, there have only been 12 African-American senators ever.
You see what I mean: These perceptions do not square with any version of observable reality. Here the numbers as they actually exist in the real world:
Transgender: 1 percent
Muslim: 1 percent
Jewish: 2 percent
Black: 12 percent
Live in New York City: 2 percent1
Gay or lesbian: 3 percent
We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.
If you go down the list of characteristics YouGov asked people about, you see a persistent mistake in one direction: Americans vastly overestimate the numbers of people in minority groups. And by “minority groups” I’m talking not just about racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. They wildly overestimate all kinds of minorities.
For instance, in addition to believing that 30 percent of the country lives in NYC, the average American thinks that 30 percent of the country lives in Texas and 32 percent lives in California.2
People think that 20 percent of the country makes $1 million (or more) per year (real number: less than 1 percent); that 54 percent of the country owns guns (real number: 32 percent); that 40 percent of the country served in the military (real number: 6 percent); and that 30 percent of the country is vegetarian (real number: 5 percent).
There’s something interesting going on here that speaks to a particularly American cognitive bias.
You might think that a normal bias would be to look around, see what is common in your experience, and extrapolate to believe that this is also for true of the rest of the world. Instead, we have the opposite.
People see very few of these characteristics in their everyday lives—and then decide that the rest of the world must be full of these minority groups they rarely encounter.
For someone living in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland, how many trans people, or Muslims, or millionaires do they meet on a daily basis? I’m guessing, just based on statistics, that the answer approaches zero.
But this average person takes the absence of those minority groups in their life and assumes that the rest of the country is chockablock with them.
That is a strange kind of bias. But wait—there’s more!
As YouGov kept going they found that people generally underestimate the size of majority populations. Here’s what they found on majority characteristics, where the number in blue is the percentage that people think exists and the number in red is the percentage that actually exists.
I would like to propose that this peculiar perception bias is indicative of something deep in the American psyche.