Are they out to get you? Who they?
During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First:
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.
People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”
I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.
Last continues:
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.
Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche.
2. Paranoia
American politics has long been driven by concerns about The Other.
Often The Other is based on race or ethnicity. Sometimes on wealth. Sometimes it’s about class.
These perception gaps suggest that Americans in the majority are deeply paranoid about their own position relative to The Other. They believe that people who are nothing like them make up some massive but invisible bloc, while the people who are very much like them—whom they see every day at the store and in school—are more rare than they wish.
This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.
And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.
“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.
I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:
I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.
The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.