All the numbers on this chart make no goddamn sense. Even the most right wing of fox news watching nutjobs wouldn’t say there are %20+ trans people in the USA. They always claim it’s like 3 people and that’s why they need to ignore them/they don’t matter.
I need to see the region they polled in. Preferably the exact counties because these numbers don’t make sense for either of the extreme sides answers, but also the moderates wouldn’t answer some of these questions these ways either.
Who TF did they get answers from??
"-How many live in New York?
-30%!"
xD
The income estimates are interesting.
We’re apparently quite bad at estimating all income levels except who earns $100,000-$500,000 / year.
I think it’s because $100k-$500k is a good range for the “rich” people that you normally interact with. That would cover things like lawyers, surgeons, engineers.
I’m not buying that atheist one.
I bet if we’re going by self-report, a lot of people who “aren’t religious” still shy away from the atheism label.
Live in NYC could be 5%-6% for greater area. Self reported Atheism can be influenced by wanting to be in an in group. Its more than 3%.
How is driver’s license possession lower than car ownership?
Licenses are cheap, cars can be shared, people tend to get a license before they get a car too. You would expect licenses to be more common than ownership. Also no matter how many cars you own, it only counts as one for this stat, one car owner can own many cars and still be just one car owner.
33% Atheist
27% Muslim
30% Jewish
58% Christian (41% being Catholic, so that’s about 70% of all Christians)This just proves that Americans do indeed have more people per capita.
How tf car-brained USAinians in a car-dependant society assume only half the population owns a car?
Or that a fifth/a quarter of the country is Muslim/transgender/living on a million per year?
Or that NY is a third of the USA?Is this data just bs?
The NY one is wild. But cars I can see. Couples who share and teenagers.
Or that 90% have high school degree. Either the education is terrible or the stats are bs.
Regardless of if the stats are accurate, I can assure you the education is terrible.
Clearly 24%(=89%-65%) of the population with a highschool degree give the impression they don’t have it.
Tbh that seems fair, perhaps a bit low :D.
It says 3% of Americans are atheists, but about 29% of Americans are “religiously unaffiliated”. I would say the poll only overestimated by 4%.
People can be agnostic too, I think religiously unaffiliated doesn’t mean they are atheist but the reverse is true.
Tbh unless a survey specified otherwise I would think it just means not religious.
Read the linked source.
the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’
Many of the unaffiliated retain religious beliefs or practices without affiliating.
One fifth of the US public and a third of adults under the age of 30 are reportedly unaffiliated with any religion, however they identify as being spiritual in some way. Of these religiously unaffiliated Americans, 37% classify themselves as spiritual but not religious.
Affiliation is about which community you are affiliated with. It’s not about beliefs at all, actually. Affiliated means “I would call myself an X”, and if you are not affiliated with a certain group, you are not affiliated, no matter if you are atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious or even religious but not strong enough to actually affiliate with one group.
Remember, atheism is a belief in itself, contrary to agnosticism. Atheism is the conviction that no God exists, even though there’s no proof for an absence of a God. Agnosticism on the other hand is acknowledging that there is no proof that God does or doesn’t exist, so they just don’t care about it.
Atheism is in many ways similar to a religion. There are communities formed around the shared belief that God doesn’t exist, they preach that God doesn’t exist, they study their literature to find proof that God doesn’t exist. They defend their faith that God doesn’t exist, like any religious person would defend theirs. There are even atheist missionaries who stand on street corners preaching that God doesn’t exist.
To be an Atheist is to believe so strongly that God doesn’t exist that it becomes something like a religion in itself, and that’s rather rare.
Agnosticism on the other hand is really wide-spread, even within religiously affiliated people. There are tons of religiously affiliated people who are socially religiously affiliated but are actually agnostic (“All my friends and family are X. I don’t really care whether God exists or not, I don’t really believe in the spiritual teachings of my faith, but I’m not that much at odds with it that I can’t live as an X, and denouncing the faith would lead to repercussions, so I’ll just formally keep being X, because it’s less hassle.”).
Ah, New York City, population 120 million.
My takeaway is that people are pretty good at estimating how many people have children and voted in 2020.
Given that the “estimated proportion” range is only between 20-76%, this seems more indicative of a poor understanding of statistics than an over/under estimation of specific demographics, especially since a lot of contradictory demographics are way overestimated.
For example, I am significantly more likely to believe that Americans suck at percentages than that they believe nearly ever single person in the country is either Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic (these three “estimated proportions” add up to 98%).
Side note: interestingly all religious categories listed add up to 189%, but there is some overlap depending on definition (e.g. some people might argue that “Catholics are Christians” or “Jewish is an ethnicity so you can be Jewish and atheist”). Thus I picked the three that most people would agree are extremely unlikely to overlap, which coincidentally added up to nearly 100%.
Try adding up ethnic groups. If you count Jewish as a separate ethnicity, you get an estimated total of 225% and even without Jews it’s still 195%.
Don’t mistake aggregate with individual responses. In aggregate a survey sample might result in a sum of 98% are Muslim, Catholic or Jewish but no individual selected that sum. We could imagine a scenario where each individual chose one of those as a large majority, for example.
That said, it is true that many people really don’t understand data and it’s implications and tend to consistently overestimate many unlikely probabilities. Source: I teach statistics…
I wonder if the questions were phrased like “none/some/many/most/all” and not percentages?
I don’t know how else a significant sample size would end up with an average guess that 1/3 of the US population lives in NYC.
What? Of course Catholics are Christians. It’s literally a denomination of Christianity, a proper subset.
I don’t disagree, but I have seen surveys before that list Catholic and Christian as separate mutually exclusive categories (as in they used “Christian” to mean “Protestant”) and Protestant is not listed in the graphic in question so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I found it unbelievable as well so I tested these questions on college and graduate students. Answers were in range. CS majors literally believed that 40% of Americans are black and a third of the population lives in Texas.
What a person needs to answer correctly is sociocultural awareness.
I think this still shows a poor grasp of percentages/statistics. If you were to follow up the Texas question by asking in turn, “what percentage live in California?” " How about New York?" “And Florida?” “So then what percentage live in the 46 remaining states plus US territories?” you’d watch a classroom of students slowly realize they’ve way surpassed 100% thanks to their overinflated initial estimates. Or conversely, if you gave them a paper with a list of states and asked them to write down what percentage of Americans lived in each state next to the state’s name, it might not be accurate, but it would probably add up to 100% for significantly more respondents.
The over/under estimation problem is almost certainly worsened when you ask about a single demographic in isolation, rather than all possible demographics at once.
No, that thing is just wrong. They “interviewed” two groups of 1000 people online who had opted into their “panel”. Either they’re lying about bias, or they were scammed.
The easiest giveaway is the “40% of adults are veterans” number. The average American is well aware that almost half their aquientances are not veterans.
This looks like a poll conducted entirely among silicone valley tech bros.
I urge anyone who doubts these results to test them on people they know. Yes, Americans, even those with college degrees, are incomprehensibly ignorant.
The U.S. Census Bureau did an online poll of 1000 people? Where did you find that information? Even the short description lists 3 sources by name. But yeah people guessing 30% of the population lives in NYC is crazy. Strange guesses
They listed sources for the “True Proportion”, but not the estimates. It doesn’t actually say who they asked for the “Estimated Proportion” figures.
Wait wat? How could anybody able to walk around or eat soup think 30% of Americans live in New York City?
Also, Gallup poll results estimating number of gay Americans have risen from 5% to 7.6% in the last 5 years. It’s clearly not 3%. This chart is bogus.
I’m here stuck on 65% of Americans own a house. In this economy??
I read something the other day about how there has been a slowdown, but not as much as we think. People are just taking on larger debt and paying a larger cut of their monthly income to buy homes.
4% bisexual; 3% gay or lesbian
there are citations in the image though?
The one that really got me was 12% black. I would have said 20% or so. The sexual, religion and race questions are wild! 30% Jewish?! Guess they’re all in NYC. 😂
