I am a consistent critic of the “data” of surveys and opinion polls as well as traditional sentiment measurement.
There are many reasons for this: Half of Americans don’t vote, and when they do answer polls, they mess things up. Even when they say they vote, there’s little reason to believe them. I don’t know who still has a landline or who answers an unknown call on their cell phone, but I wonder if these people represent America at large.
In the car on the way to Grand Lake Stream and Camp Kotok, another interesting survey question came up:
“What do people actually know compared to what they think they know?“
Tom Morgan of The Leading Edge raised this issue in response to a discussion about how little the phrase “I don’t know“ – particularly, but not exclusively, in the financial sector.
Tom presented a fascinating analysis of how people perceive other groups, be it by economic class, behavior, race, religion, etc.
Taylor Orth is the head of survey data journalism at YouGov. They studied what different people believe about the size of different subgroups of Americans. There are two important insights.
First, how wrong people were. In two YouGov polls, “respondents were asked to estimate the percentage (between 0% and 100%) of American adults who belong to 43 different groups, including ethnic and religious groups, as well as other, less frequently surveyed groups such as pet owners and left-handedness.”
Americans greatly overestimate the size of minority groups, including sexual minorities, the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, actual: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%), religious minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, etc.
And people tend to Underestimate majority groups.
Looking at the chart above, we can see that the average answer ranges from very wrong to ridiculously wrong. None of this is complicated or hard to find; all of the information is easily accessible to anyone who wants to know it. Our panel of economists and fund managers did a pretty good job of answering Tom’s questions and answers about the actual and estimated numbers.
But the second aspect is even more fascinating. Why don’t people just say, “I DON’T KNOW,” when they don’t know something?
We debated whether COVID escaped from a lab or from the market. My response: “As someone who is neither a virologist nor an intelligence officer, I don’t have the wherewithal to make an expert judgment about the origins of Covid. And I tend not to believe that conspiracy theorists can keep most big secrets for that long.”
Dave Nadig explained, “Social media has made it mandatory for everyone to have an opinion on everything.”
We should all ask ourselves: Why?
Previously:
Learning to say “I don’t know” (September 9, 2016)
What do you think? Why? (June 29, 2023)
source:
From millionaires to Muslims: Small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans
by Taylor Orth
15 March 2022
