Americans overestimate minority population, underestimate size of majority groups

[Trump v. Wong Kim Ark]

I think my favorite thing here is Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, and Catholic combining for 131%.

Yeah, that almost seems like reason enough to throw it out due to methodological issues.

That's not a methodoogical issue. The entire point is that people think that these minority groups are impossibly large.

Sure, but allowing people to say 131% rather than just that Christians are only like 25% seems like bad design.

[DaleCooper]

This is a reflection of infotainment and the two political parties obsessing over small groups of people rather than focusing on issues that affect most Americans regardless of identity. It's also caused by the entertainment industry turning every scene into a diversity mosaic high school textbook cover. The latter is, I suspect, even more the cause of the confusion. If you're someone who doesn't travel much and you just exist in your own sliver of the country, but you watch television or use social media, you probably would believe that close to half the population is black or that 30-40% of the country is LGBT.

[Ferguson97]

Some of the other numbers you can chalk up to disproportionate media attention making people think that those groups are larger than they actually are, but the fact that respondents guessed that 30% of Americans live in New York, I think that this is a case of "people do not understand percentages" more than anything else.

[DaleCooper]

Some of the other numbers you can chalk up to disproportionate media attention making people think that those groups are larger than they actually are, but the fact that respondents guessed that 30% of Americans live in New York, I think that this is a case of "people do not understand percentages" more than anything else.

Piss poor education is the source of all of it, because that's why they're so easily misled, but it's the media that is misleading them. It's not even deliberate. A lot of it is that the media is full of people who have never spent time anywhere other than New York City or a city in California.

[kwabbit]

All surveys have errors, but I find it hard to believe that the results as a whole are skewed because of people not understanding how to use the slider. For all the complaints you hear about cities having too much control and rural areas having none, these numbers do support why some have those beliefs. New York City is large, but only a slim percentage of the overall population. The average person probably isn't going to properly calculate that out of a total population of 330 million percentage wise. Large whole numbers are going to equal a big percentage for some people.

It's not that they didn't know how the slider worked, the slider was just screwed up so it was hard to use. I believe the study was done largely on mobile, where something like a slider can just not work as intended. There was no incentive for the users to painstakingly move each slider so this is what happened.

Literally all of the analysis in this thread is worthless; the results of the survey are not indicative of anything really. Perhaps directionally Americans think there are more Black people than trans people, but the exact numbers are meaningless.

[SInNYC]

Since many of these categories don't overlap, lots of people apparently believe that the number of Americans is 200% of the number of Americans. Or something like that.