Britons aren’t uniquely ignorant, most countries have got their facts wrong

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/britons-not-ignorant-most-countries-facts-wrong

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We know from past surveys that people in Britain are wildly wrong on many basic facts about our population. The average person has a pretty poor understanding of things like what proportion of the population are immigrants or Muslims, what percentage of teenage girls get pregnant each year and how the government spends our money. But are we uniquely ignorant in Britain?

It turns out that people in other countries are just as wrong – in fact, often much more so than the British. Americans think that a quarter of US teenage girls give birth each year – when it is actually 3%. The US is also one of the countries that are furthest from reality on the extent of immigration, with an average guess of 31%, when the actual proportion is 13%.

The French think 30% of the population are Muslims, when the real figure is 8%. The French are also too pessimistic about others’ democratic engagement: they think only 58% voted in the last presidential election, when 80% did.

Incredibly, Italians think that nearly half of their population is over 65 years old. Italy does have a relatively old population, but the actual figure is only 21%. Even more bizarrely, Italians also think half their population is unemployed, when the real figure is only 12%.

Looking across all the questions, Britain actually does relatively well: we’re fifth most accurate out of 14 countries in the “index of ignorance”. Italy is the most wrong, with the US next worst. The most accurate countries are Sweden and Germany – although even here, people are often very wrong.

So what’s going on – why are perceptions so far from reality?

It’s partly that people just struggle with basic maths, and some clearly misunderstand the questions – there are lots of ludicrous estimates from many individual respondents. People take all sorts of mental shortcuts, where they grab for easily available information even if it doesn’t quite fit the question. In Daniel Kahneman’s terms, answers to these sorts of questions are classic examples of fast thinking, rather than slow thinking.

Of course, the media are also bound to have a role in exaggerating our misperceptions – but we need to be careful here. Whenever we release results from these studies in the UK, one of the first responses is always “that will be a Daily Mail effect”. But the fact that this happens everywhere shows we can’t lay the blame entirely at one particular or even type of newspaper: if the media are a cause, it’s a much broader, global issue. The real driver is how we remember information, where vivid anecdotes stick, regardless of whether they are describing something very rare.

We also suffer from what social psychologists call “emotional innumeracy” when answering these types of questions: we are sending a message about what’s worrying us as much as trying to get the right answers. Cause and effect can run both ways, with our concern leading to our misperceptions as much as our misperceptions creating our concern.

Given this, do our misperceptions matter? There are clear instances where they are important. We know, for example, that our mental image of normal behaviour influences how we ourselves behave. Consistently underestimating voter turnout is a problem then, as people have the wrong idea about the norm. An unfounded fear of rising crime can also directly affect our quality of life and make us focus too much time and resources on the issue.

There are also more doom-laden schools of thought that what we’re measuring here is rational ignorance: people have no reason to inform themselves, with all the costs of time and effort that involves, if they can’t influence anything. What’s the point in finding out how the government spends our money, whether crime is increasing or decreasing or how many immigrants are coming to the country if our vote doesn’t affect political outcomes and decisions remain outside our control?

In this reading, our ignorance is a fatal flaw in our centralised democratic system – one that cannot be overcome. The only option is to slash central political control, and push decisions down to local areas where choices are more personal and therefore better informed.

This is a logical conclusion, but extreme – our lack of political power is far from the only reason for our ignorance. Our study shows it’s not quite as consistent and inevitable as this suggests – some countries have a much better grasp of reality than others, and understanding why could help (it doesn’t seem to be national education levels or press behaviour, from our analysis).

But it does point to one key trap. Our ignorance is as much a symptom of our lack of control as a reason to keep power with an elite who supposedly know better. We should not conclude that people are too dumb to be trusted to make decisions – if we want a better-informed population, we need to trust them more.