Where do we think these false pictures of each other come from? Word of mouth? Movies? Written news or video news? School materials? The 24-hour campaign?
I will say that at minimum, these impressions "how many of X" are what one would get from entertainment media and video news. So the deeper question becomes "Who would like you to think so?" and "Do those those people know the real answer themselves?"
You could make a whole week of civics class out of discussing "Why do we think this?" one at a time.
4 comments:
I wonder if the estimate for the proportion of lefties is driven by baseball
I would like to see two charts, one for estimates by liberals and one for conservatives. I think you would find that the estimates by conservatives are more accurate.
I think that efforts to define or categorize on such a large scale are, at best, useless and at worst, misleading. Dunbar's number is valid (IMHO) and it's hard to scale up from 300 to 350,000,000. That we're influenced by media is undoubtedly true, but possibly more so by advertising and sitcoms than news reels.
I don't think so. The high guesses for low actual percentages seem to me to cluster around 33%, give or take. I suspect people realize the traits are not common enough to support a 50/50 guess and default to 1 in 3 as 'not common but I know lots of people talk about this'
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