People are often incredibly wrong about key social and political realities in their countries, as I explore in my book,
Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything, which draws on over 100,000 interviews across up to 40 nations, including the U.S..
For example, people in the U.S. think that 24 percent of
teenage girls give birth each year—when it’s only 2 percent. Americans think that 33 percent of their population are immigrants, when the reality is around 14 percent—and that 17 percent of the population are Muslim, when it’s around 1 percent.
Across 30 countries, only 15 percent of people think their
national murder rate is down since 2000, when it is actually down by 29 percent.
Surveys of the general public in the U.S. show Americans are generally a pretty happy bunch, with 9 in 10 saying they’re very or rather happy. But that’s not our impression of our fellow citizens: We think only half of other Americans would say they’re happy.
All the best evidence, including a review of over 1 million children, suggests there is no link between vaccines and autism in healthy children. But 4 in 10 Americans think there is, or they are not sure.
The temptation is to cry “post-truth’” and entirely blame our increasingly sensationalist media, social media, and tribal politicians for misleading and bringing us down. But this is not a new phenomenon. Similar misperceptions have been measured all the way back to ’40s America: Our delusions apply across time periods, countries, and issues.
The stability of our misperceptions points to a key conclusion. There is no single cause. Instead it is a “system of delusion,” based on two groups of effects that interact: “how we think,” our many biases and faulty mental shortcuts; and “what we’re told” by the media, social media, and politicians.
A book written especially for lustyLaffer and bambutt
