The Perils of Perception E-Book

Bobby Duffy

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

New Statesman's Best Books of 2018 'Mandatory reading' Steven Pinker Do you eat too much sugar? What proportion of your country are immigrants? What does it cost to raise a child? How much tax do the rich pay? Are we more ignorant than we used to be? Take a minute to answer these questions. No matter how educated you are, this book suggests you are likely to be very wrong indeed. Informed by exclusive research across 40 countries, conducted by global polling firm Ipsos, The Perils of Perception investigates why we don't know basic facts about the world around us. Using the latest research into the media and decision science, Bobby Duffy asks how we can address our ignorance and why the populations of some countries seem better informed than others. Essential reading in the so-called 'post-truth' era, this book will transform the way you engage with the world.

Leseprobe

THE PERILSOF PERCEPTION

WHY WE’RE WRONG ABOUTNEARLY EVERTHING

‘Interesting and well-informed. Duffy is a voice of calm reason amid all our anxieties about a post-truth world.’

Lord David Willetts – Executive Chair of the Resolution Foundation

‘A great read that will help you get a better fix on reality. This book will help you understand why many of the things you think are probably wrong.’

Hetan Shah – Executive Director, The Royal Statistical Society

‘Fantastic: there are eye-opening and shocking statistics on every page. The Perils of Perception may force you to reconsider your most deeply held views.’

Jamie Bartlett – author of The People Vs Tech

‘An essential read. This book lays bare the struggle and pitfalls faced by opinion formers and policy makers alike if they are to inform policy on the basis of facts rather than perceptions.’

Alberto Nardelli – Europe Editor, BuzzFeed News

To Bridget and Martha,who I know will cost me a lot morethan £458,000.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by AtlanticBooks, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This edition published 2019

Copyright © Bobby Duffy, 2018

The moral right of Bobby Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 458 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 457 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

All figure sources and data are available from www.perils.ipsos.comexcept the following:

Pew Research Center, Political Polarization, 1994–2017 (page xiv):www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/

‘Trends in birth rates per 1000 females aged 15–19 by ethnicity in the US’ (page 64): www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-development/reproductive-healthand-teen-pregnancy/teen-pregnancy-and-childbearing/trends/index.html

‘Do you feel closer to a particular party than all other parties?’ (page 158):European Social Survey 2002–2016

‘Key moves in public trust over time’ (page 237): Ipsos MORI Veracity Index

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

Perils Everywhere

Chapter 1

A Healthy Mind

Chapter 2

Sexual Fantasies

Chapter 3

On the Money?

Chapter 4

Inside and Out: Immigration and Religion

Chapter 5

Safe and Secure

Chapter 6

Political Misdirection and Disengagement

Chapter 7

Brexit and Trump: Wishful and Wrongful Thinking

Chapter 8

Filtering Our Worlds

Chapter 9

Worldwide Worry

Chapter 10

Who’s Most Wrong?

Chapter 11

Managing Our Misperceptions

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Preface to the Paperback Edition

It’s a year on from the first publication of The Perils of Perception – and, sadly, we’re still just as wrong about nearly everything. Ipsos published a new global study at the end of 2018, covering thirty-seven countries (with some of these new findings making it into this updated edition), and we still have massive misperceptions. For example, the average guess across all the countries is that 28 per cent of their population are immigrants, when the actual figure is less than half that, at 12 per cent. We think unemployment is much higher than it actually is: the average guess is that 34 per cent of the working age population are unemployed and looking for work, when it’s actually only 7 per cent. And people guessed that young people are having sex an average of twenty times a month, when the reality is a much less insane five times!

As well as confirming how wrong we are, this survey and other new studies I’ve conducted since the book was published add three important new points to our understanding of our collective delusion.

First, the Ipsos study filled an important gap in our measurement of misperceptions. One of the most frequently made comments at book talks I’ve given is, sure, the world is often better than we think, but what about climate change and its impact on our world? Do people realize just how much our climate is shifting? We can now answer that question with a firm no: terrifyingly, seventeen of the hottest years on record happened in the last eighteen years, but the average guess across the world is that ‘only’ nine were. We’re worried, but not worried enough, and we can see direct action movements like Extinction Rebellion as a symptom of this unflinching avoidance.

Second, we’ve added to our understanding of just how differently different groups of people see the same realities. Most strikingly, people in the US have utterly opposing views of the extent of gun deaths there, depending on whether they are Republican or Democrat. Around 80 per cent of Democrats correctly say that guns kill more people in America than knives or other violence – but only 27 per cent of strong Republicans say the same. It is the same reality, seen entirely differently depending on your existing political views. A similar pattern is played out in the UK on Brexit. Two-thirds of leave supporters still believe the discredited claim that the UK sends £350 million per week to the EU, compared with only one in five remain supporters.

And this leads to the final new addition to our understanding: Brexit has provided a brilliant (and awful) live experiment in how stubborn our misperceptions are. We asked about belief in the £350 million per week figure before the referendum in May 2016, and then again at the end of 2018. And despite seemingly endless news coverage and discussion on Brexit, the exact same proportion of around four in ten of the population believed the claim. And the same is true on EU immigration: we are exactly as likely to overestimate the numbers of EU immigrants as we were in 2016. We’ve moved absolutely nowhere in our factual understanding of some of the core issues, and this has confirmed two things for me: how important emotion and identity are in how we see these key realities, and how poorly we’ve been served by the nature and quality of political and media discussion.

A System of Human Delusion

The stability of our misperceptions points to a key conclusion of the book: there are multiple drivers of our delusion, based on both ‘how we think’ – our many biases and faulty mental shortcuts – and ‘what we’re told’ by the media, social media and politicians.

Listing and grouping these different drivers of our delusions may create the impression that they are separate effects, that operate individually. This is not how it works in practice. In reality, there are myriad interactions and feedback loops between them, that together create a system of delusion.

‘How we think’ effects are often examined individually in psychology experiments. This makes sense, as these experiments are set up to test tightly specified hypotheses about the causes of our biases. And such experiments are essential to our understanding of the importance of different explanations of our faulty thinking and behaviour – but it also encourages us to think of our biases and heuristics as discrete phenomena, when they’re not. When the results from academic studies grab popular attention, they are generally presented in isolation or as checklists of distinct human quirks. This research is helpful but it can’t tell us how human delusion works in real life. Real-life contexts are complicated, and our thoughts are often susceptible to multiple, simultaneous effects: context, intent, values and identity all matter.

For example, when we massively overestimate the prevalence of teen pregnancy (which we do, as you’ll see), we’re overweighting negative, vivid stories that catch our attention and play on our susceptibility to stereotypes and misunderstanding of social norms. Researchers, academics and authors also have their own motivations (including me!) to keep it simple: single, striking messages draw more attention, more funding and more book sales! But it’s not the whole story, as the agendas of the media and politicians play a part too.

The interactions between how we think and what we’re told are not well recognized. Almost all existing analysis tends to focus on one side or the other: on our fallible human brains or a manipulative information environment that leads us astray. This echoes our human need for simplicity and solutions: we want to see problems as caused by one thing or another, providing a clear focus for blame and a single answer. We therefore miss the real issue – that we live in a system that, by default, breeds delusion from multiple sources.

Excellent books that focus mainly on our own mistaken thinking largely ignore that there are actors in politics and communications that have vested interests in pushing a particular world view at us. Other excellent analyses, for example, the many recent books on how we’re living in a ‘post-truth’ age, base their explanations almost entirely in the current political and media environment, ignoring our own biased ways of thinking.

The much more frightening reality is that one reinforces the other. Politicians, media and social media achieve the reaction they desire by, for example, emphasizing vivid, negative, stereotypical stories precisely because we are influenced more by these than accurate but dry statistics. Politicians, journalists and content creators understand this intuitively, because they are human too (despite what some think). They are subject to the same biases as the rest of us, so even where this is not part of a dastardly plan, their own delusions drive their actions. This is then reinforced in feedback loops of achieving political results, and increasingly instantaneous ratings of popularity, viewing figures, clicks, shares or likes. The delusion can easily become the reality for vast swathes of the population.

This systemic view explains why the delusions we’ll explore appear so intractable – why they are pretty constant across time, why they exist in all countries and across a very wide range of issues. This is not a strange or new phenomenon of our post-truth age. The fact that we’re so surprised by the scale of our delusions, as reflected in the gasps and laughter I hear whenever I present the results (and, to be honest, my own reaction at the findings in every new study I do), shows we naturally underestimate how baked-in it is.

Even if these problems are fundamental, leveraging them is not excusable. People who exploit the system of human delusion for their own gain present a real social risk. They need to be held to account. Equally, we as individuals have a responsibility to do all we can to resist the temptation to fall into lazy, flawed thinking – and there are some simple tactics we can employ to help, as we’ll see.

In fact, it’s more important than ever that these collective responsibilities are taken seriously – because our new, constantly evolving information environment presents an accelerating threat to a reality-based view of the world. The early days of the creation of the Internet, and then social media platforms, were filled with hope about their power to inform and connect. We largely ignored the systemic risks that they would do the exact opposite. We were insufficiently focused on how our biases and heuristics would interact with this new information environment. We were blinded by the technological advances and forgot the flawed, motivated and manipulative (in short, the human) aspects of how we produce and consume information in practice.

We need to consider these interactions much more for the inevitable next evolutions of our media and political communications. Artificial Intelligence tools mean that political campaigns can already test 100,000 variations of a message every day, to identify the most effective tweaks to messaging, targeted at individuals based on detailed profiling.1

The need for actions to both control what we’re told and help equip people to challenge how we think is more urgent than ever.

Why are we not becoming more deluded?

But there is an apparent contradiction in the themes outlined above, and throughout the book: if our information environment is changing so much, increasingly playing on our biases and feeding us more disinformation, why are we not getting more wrong about social realities?

As outlined in the Introduction, there is very little long-term trend data on our delusions – but what there is shows very little change in how wrong we are on things like unemployment levels, all the way back to 1940s America. And the studies that I ran with Ipsos and others over the past fifteen years, a period when we’d expect the effects of our changed information environment to have most taken hold, reinforce this view of stubbornly consistent errors. In every survey I’ve done, Americans and Brits think immigration is roughly twice its actual level.

Does this mean we’re worrying too much about the threat from our increasingly filtered lives and the growth of disinformation? Unfortunately, I think we’re still right to be concerned, as these new forces do have the potential to throw a relatively stable system of delusion out of balance.

First, we’re only at the start of this new communications and disinformation context. It may be that it will just take some more time to work through into our misperceptions. More than this, we need to keep a very clear eye on the future, not just our current technological capabilities to manipulate and target information. These are evolving at an accelerating pace, and their impact is difficult to predict and could tip us quickly into even deeper delusions. We need to break out of our current trap of responding to present capabilities and threats – because the technology constantly adapts before we can act.

Second, we may be looking in the wrong place, if we’re focused solely on our misperceptions. I’ve always thought of our delusions about key social realities as important indicators, not as the key concern in themselves. They show us what we’re worried about, what messages we’re hearing or not hearing, and what we’re willing to express to others. But they are only one part of how we see and think about the world.

The impact of this information shift may not, therefore, be on our estimates of realities, but how certain we are of our world view – and how wrong we think others are. In other words, how polarized our perspectives are becoming.

There is significant evidence of this polarization across societies, suggesting we’re fragmenting into ‘tribes’ 2 with highly divergent views. For example, evidence from the Pew Research Center for the US is compelling. This outlines how the partisan gap in political values in the US has widened dramatically in the past twenty years, and particularly since the early 2000s. In 2004, there was only a 17 percentage point gap between the average Democrat and average Republican supporters on ten political values, such as whether the government should do more to help the needy, or whether racial discrimination is the main reason why Black people can’t get ahead these days. By 2017 this gap had more than doubled to 36 percentage points. 3

Figure 1. The US public has become more politically polarized over the past two decades. Source: Pew Research Center

Between 1994 and 2017, we moved from a position where 65 per cent of Republicans were more ‘conservative’ in their attitudes than the average Democrat, to almost entirely distinct tribes where 95 per cent of Republicans have more conservative views than the average Democrat.

In the end, this is the main answer to the ‘so what’ question I sometimes get when talking about our misperceptions: what does it matter if we have wrong and opposing views of the world around us? There are many misperceptions in the book that do have real consequences on our own and others’ lives. For example, many people’s utterly unfounded suspicion of vaccines directly impacts vaccination rates and therefore increases health risks for whole communities. There are others that can shape huge political outcomes, such as with Brexit, but more generally, anti-immigration parties tend to benefit from an overblown sense of the scale of the issue. There are many more practical implications at an individual and societal level, on our health, finances, relationships and politics. But, in the end, it’s the fracturing of a shared sense of what the world is really like, where the risks lie, and why our misperceptions really matter.

Bobby DuffyApril 2019

Introduction

Perils Everywhere

I hated my psychology classes at college. As I remember them now, they were taught by a succession of super-smart, suave professors with identikit looks, closer to snake-hipped rock stars than fusty academics. They were all tall and slim, with haircuts that didn’t play by professorial rules. They wore all-black clothes or, at a push, paisley shirts, and shoes that were just that bit too pointy. (I admit, jealousy may be clouding my own perceptions a little; in fact, I think I’ve just described Russell Brand.) The students, of both genders, swooned – not so much because of the professors’ rebellious looks, but because they seemed to know so much about how we thought. There’s nothing more attractive to most confused young adults than someone who really understands them.

But I had a problem with that. I hated the cognitive tricks that proved we nearly all fall into the same mistaken ways of thinking. They’d set us up with questions or experiments that were custom-made to elicit a particular answer and show how typical our brains were. At that insecure but arrogant age, I wanted to be special and unpredictable – but my answers were just like everybody else’s.

Take this example, from a professor at the University of Maryland:

You have the opportunity to earn some extra credit on your final grade. Select whether you want two points or six points added onto your final paper grade. But there’s a small catch: if more than 10 per cent of the class selects six points, then no one gets any points, not even the people who chose two points.1

Here is a very direct and teachable moment, a lesson in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – where individuals try to obtain the greatest benefit from a particular resource, taking more than their equal or sustainable share, and therefore ruin it for everyone, including themselves. Of course, the class conformed to type, and failed. Around 20 per cent selected six points, so they all got nothing. In fact, only one class in one semester over the eight years the professor had been conducting his mildly cruel experiment had actually managed to get the extra credits.

Given my lingering sensitivity to psychological tricks, it’s not without irony that a lot of my working life has been focused on running similar tests. I spent twenty years at opinion research firm Ipsos MORI, designing and dissecting research from around the world to help understand what people think and do, and why. I’m now a (definitely not snake-hipped) Professor at King’s College London, focusing on the same challenges of public delusion, and what they mean for public policy. Across these roles I’ve run hundreds of surveys on public misperceptions – what we call the ‘Perils of Perception’ – investigating a range of social and political issues, from sexual behaviour to personal finance, across a large number of countries. We now have over 100,000 interviews, across forty countries on some questions, allowing us to weigh up our perceptions against reality. This is a unique and fascinating source of data on how we see the world, and why we’re often so wrong about it: previous work has tended to focus on one issue or sphere of life, and few get beyond a handful of countries. You can dig into the full set of Ipsos studies at: www.perils.ipsos.com

Across all the studies and in every country, people get a lot wrong on nearly every subject we’ve covered, including immigration levels, teen pregnancy, crime rates, obesity, trends in global poverty and how many of us are on Facebook. But the key question is ‘Why?’.

Let’s start off with a question that’s got very little to do with the sort of social and political realities we’ll look at later, but helps to highlight why there might be this gap between perceptions and reality: ‘Is the Great Wall of China visible from outer space?’ What do you think? If you’re anything like the population in general, there was about a 50–50 chance that you answered ‘yes’, as surveys show that half of people say they believe the Great Wall is visible from space.2 They’re wrong – it’s not.

At its widest, the Great Wall is only nine metres across, about the size of a small house. It’s also built of rock that is similar in colour to the surrounding mountains, so it blends in with the landscape. When you take a bit of time to think about it, the idea that the Great Wall is visible from space is actually slightly ridiculous, but there are some very good reasons why you might have thought it is.

First, it’s not something you’ll have pondered on a lot. Unlike me, you probably haven’t looked up the width of the Wall or its distance from outer space (and then got caught up in endless forum discussions about the claim). You don’t have the pertinent facts readily available to you.

Second, you may have vaguely heard someone say it when you weren’t paying much attention. You may even have seen it in print or heard it on the television. For years, Trivial Pursuit had it as an (incorrect) answer. You’re less likely to have seen it in Chinese school textbooks, but it’s still noted as a fact in those. However, you’ve likely seen it somewhere, probably more than once, and haven’t seen anything to contradict the assertion, so it settled in your head.

Third, you almost certainly answered the question quickly, wanting to get on with the rest of the book – the sort of ‘fast-thinking’ popularized by the Nobel prizewinning behavioural scientist Daniel Kahneman that relies on mental shortcuts. You may therefore have confused different measures of scale. We know that the Great Wall of China is extremely ‘big’ – in fact, it’s one of the largest man-made structures on earth. But that is mainly due to its length, which isn’t the property that will make it visible from outer space.

Most important, your answer was also perhaps more emotional than you might think for such a mundane trivia question. Spend some time researching the answer, and you’ll discover that even astronauts argue over it. (For the record, Neil Armstrong says it’s not visible, which is good enough for me.) You’ll even find photos from seemingly reliable sources purporting to show the Great Wall as seen from space. (In at least one case, the photo was of a canal.) With something as big as the Great Wall, we want to believe that astronauts, aliens, even gods, can see our handiwork. We want it to be true because it’s impressive – and this emotional response alters our perception of reality.

Drawing on faulty prior knowledge, answering a different question than the one we are asked, juggling comparisons across different scales, relying on fast-thinking and missing how our emotions shape what we see and think, are just some of the perils of perception we face every day. The Great Wall of China is a real, physical thing, an object that can be measured. Imagine now how the same problems of perception wreak havoc when we are contemplating complex and disputed social and political realities.

But there is a final point. Now I’ve pointed out that the best evidence is that the Great Wall is not visible from space, you probably believe me, and if you had a vague idea it was, you’ve probably changed your mind. Of course, this is not a highly-charged debate, tied up with your identity and tribal connections, so it is easier to shrug and update your view. But still the point remains that we have the ability to adapt our beliefs in the face of new facts.

Having started with (literally) a trivia question, it is worth emphasizing that this is firmly not the focus of the book, fascinating and satisfying as (other people’s) factual ignorance and belief in the absurd can be. We love to smirk at the one in ten French people who still believe the earth may be flat; the quarter of Australians who think that cavemen and dinosaurs existed at the same time; the one in nine Brits who think the 9/11 attacks were a US government conspiracy; or the 15 per cent of Americans who believe that the media or government adds secret mind-controlling signals to television transmissions.3 Our main interest is not niche stupidity or minority belief in conspiracies, but much more general and widespread misperceptions about individual, social and political realities.

Let’s look at one very basic question about the state of society that is much closer to our focus: ‘What proportion of the population of your country is aged sixty-five or over?’ Think about it yourself. You may have heard that your country has an ageing population, or that it even faces a demographic ‘time bomb’, that the population of older people is getting too large for the younger people in your country to support in their retirement. The media frequently highlight the pressures on the economy of supporting a growing elderly population, particularly in countries such as Italy and Germany. There have even been stories on how, in Japan, adult nappy sales are set to overtake baby nappy sales. These stories may be apocryphal, but they provide such a vivid image that they stick with us.

So, what would you guess?

When we asked members of the public in fourteen countries, in every single country the average guess was much higher than the actual proportion. In Italy the actual figure is 21 per cent, while in Japan it’s 25 per cent. These are big numbers – one in five and one in four of the whole population, and roughly double the proportion compared to a generation or two ago. Yet, the average guesses were around twice the actual population figures. People in Italy thought 48 per cent of the population – about half – were sixty-five or older.

As you can see from this one, very simple example, our misperceptions are not just driven by the particularly febrile political moment we’re living through. There are no massive misinformation campaigns by automated bots on Facebook or Twitter trying to convince us that our populations are older than they really are, but we’re still very wrong. Our delusion is wide, deep and long-standing. Political ignorance has been a concern from the very dawn of democracy, with Plato’s grousing that the general public were too ignorant to select a government or hold it to account.

Figure 2. All countries hugely overestimated the proportion of their population aged 65 or over.

It is hard to prove that misperceptions have been widespread for a long time, because measuring them requires representative surveys, and social scientists started conducting rigorous public opinion polls only relatively recently. In the middle of the twentieth century, surveys of people’s perception of social realities were rare, limited primarily to simple political facts – for example, which party was in power, what their policies were and who the leaders were. But some of these early questions, first posed as far back as the forties, have been asked again in recent studies and, as we’ll see, the responses suggest that nothing much has changed.4 People were as likely to be wrong back then as they are now, long before 2016, when ‘post-truth’ (the idea that objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief) was named ‘Word of the Year’ by Oxford Dictionaries.

That’s not to say that our current, ideologically-driven discourse and the explosion of social technology have no effect on our perceptions of reality, or that we’re not living in particularly dangerous times. In fact, those technological shifts are particularly terrifying in their effect on our accurate view of the world or key issues – because the quantum leap in our ability to choose and others to push ‘individual realities’ at us plays to some of our deepest biases, in preferring our existing world view and in avoiding conflicting information.

But that’s exactly the point – if we only focus on what’s out there, what we’re told, we’ll miss a key element of the problem: it’s partly how we think that causes us to misperceive the world.

This raises an important point about the findings of the Perils of Perception surveys – the focus of these studies is not primarily to root out ignorance so much as to discover misperceptions. It seems a fine distinction, and drawing a clear line between the two is often difficult in practice, but the principle is essential.

Ignorance means literally ‘to not know’ or to be unacquainted with. Misperceptions, however, are a positive misunderstanding of reality or, as Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and his colleagues put it: ‘misperceptions differ from ignorance insofar as people often hold them with a high degree of certainty… and consider themselves to be well informed’.5 Few of the people we’ve surveyed think of themselves as ignorant; they are answering what they believe to be true.

In practice, rather than a neat delineation, there is a spectrum of false belief from ignorance to delusion. People are moveable and unsure of their certainty in many cases. The distinction shows up how difficult it is to change people’s misperceptions simply by giving them more information, as though they are an empty vessel just waiting to be filled with facts that will fix their mindset and behaviour.

An investigation of misperception instead of ignorance shifts the focus from public opinion as a blank slate to be written on, to a sense of a range of people holding a range of opinions and beliefs motivated by many of the same, underlying ways of thinking. It raises the vital question of why we believe what we do – this is the real value in understanding the perils of perception. Our misperceptions can provide clues to what we’re most worried about – and where we’re not as worried as we should be. As we’ll see, attention-grabbing stories of teenage pregnancies or terrorist attacks make us think these phenomena are more common than they really are, while our own self-denial leads us to underestimate obesity levels in the population as a whole.

Our misperceptions also provide more subtle lessons. What we think others do and believe – that is, what we think the ‘social norm’ is – can have a profound effect on how we ourselves act, even when our understanding of that norm is hopelessly misguided. For example, many of us are saving too little into our pension pots to support a decent lifestyle when we retire – but we think this is more common than it actually is. Given we instinctively feel there is safety in being in the ‘herd’, this misperception that it’s normal not to save could negatively impact our own behaviour.

More than that, when we compare what we think others do to what we say we do, we get a hint of how we view those behaviours – for instance, what things we do that we’re ashamed of. Sometimes what we’re ashamed of is surprising – and enlightening. As we’ll see in the first chapter, it seems we’re more ashamed of overeating sugar than of not exercising. Realizing that we’re more likely to lie to ourselves about how much sugar we consume is a vital step to improving our health – as individuals and as a society. There are lessons for each of us, even if we feel pretty well-informed about the world. Our errors aren’t about gross stupidity: we’re all subject to personal biases and external influences on our thinking that can distort our view of reality.

We can classify all the varied explanations of our misperceptions into two groups: how we think and what we’re told.

How We Think

We have to start with how our brains grapple with numbers, mathematics and statistical concepts. Given that we’re often asked to quantify the world and our perceptions of it, numeracy plays a large part in how well we understand the world overall. The statistics about data growth are themselves impossible for us to fully grasp: incredibly, over 90 per cent of the data on the Internet was created in the last two years; 44 billion gigabytes of data were created on the Internet every day in 2016, but this is projected to grow to 463 billion gigabytes a day by 2025.6 With the exponential growth in data being created and communicated about many of the things that concern us, the issue of numeracy is ever more vital.

Dealing with the types of calculations we now need to make doesn’t come completely naturally to many of us. MRI studies of the brains of humans (and monkeys!) indicate that we have an inbuilt ‘number sense’, but we are particularly attuned to the numbers one, two and three, and, beyond that, to detecting large (not small) differences in comparing numbers of an object.7 We often fall back on these evolutionary number skills.

But much of life involves calculations that are more complex than comparing the relative size of small numbers. A century ago the great science fiction writer H. G. Wells said:

… endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when… for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.8

Wells’s reference to how important mathematical understanding is to ‘endless social and political problems’ seems made for our times, but we’ve got a long way to go before we’ll completely satisfy his vision. Countless experiments show that around 10 per cent of the public don’t understand simple percentages.9 Many more of us have problems understanding probability. The French scholar, Pierre-Simon Laplace, called probabilities ‘common sense reduced to a calculus’, but that doesn’t make most of us any better at calculating them.10 For example, if you spin a coin twice, what’s the probability of getting two heads? The answer is 25 per cent, because there are four equal-probability outcomes: two heads, two tails, heads then tails and tails then heads. Worryingly, only one in four people in a nationally representative survey got this right, even when they were prompted with multiple-choice answers.11 This may seem a rather abstract test of our ability to understand key facts about the world, but, as we’ll see, probabilistic thinking is the foundation for building an accurate sense of social realities.

So it is concerning that we don’t seem to be that bothered about our lack of basic mathematical fluency. In a study we conducted for the Royal Statistical Society in the UK we found that, contrary to Wells’s vision, the public put much more importance on words than we do on numbers (which was a bit depressing for both me and the Royal Statistical Society). When we asked people what would make them prouder of their kids, being good with words or being good with numbers, only 13 per cent said they would be most proud about their child’s mathematical ability, with 55 per cent saying they’d be most proud of their child’s reading and writing ability. (The other 32 per cent said they wouldn’t be proud about either, which seems particularly mean-spirited tiger parenting!)12

Our misperceptions are very far from all being about our less-than-perfect knowledge of probabilistic statistics. Over the past decades, pioneers in the fields of behavioural economics and social psychology have conducted thousands of experiments to identify and understand other mistakes and shortcuts commonly made by the human mind – what are called ‘biases’ and ‘heuristics’. They have explored our bias towards information that confirms what we already believe, our focus on negative information, our susceptibility to stereotyping and how we like to imitate the majority. As Daniel Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky hypothesized, our judgements and preferences are typically the result of so-called fast-thinking, unless or until they are modified or overridden by slow, deliberate reasoning.13

One common mental error that is worth flagging upfront, both because it may be less familiar and because it is so crucial to many misperceptions that we’ll discuss, is ‘emotional innumeracy’, a theory which proposes that when we’re wrong about a social reality, cause and effect may very well run in both directions: our concern means we overestimate the prevalence of an issue, as much as the prevalence causing our concern. For example, say that people overestimate the level of crime in their country. Do they overestimate crime because they are concerned about it, or are they concerned about it because they overestimate it? There are good reasons to think it’s a bit of both, creating a feedback loop of misperception that is very difficult to break.

Finally, there is the possibility that our misperceptions are almost entirely shaped by instinctive workings in our brain – an idea born out of the field of psychophysics (the study of our psychological reactions to physical stimuli). This has only just started to be applied to social issues, and analyses by David Landy and his graduate students Eleanor Brower and Brian Guay at Indiana University suggest that a significant portion of many of the errors we make in estimating social realities might be explained by the sorts of biases they see in how people report physical stimuli. For example, we underestimate loud sounds and very bright light, and overestimate quiet sounds and low lights, in a quite predictable way – a pattern we also see in the data about how we perceive the state of social and political realities. We hedge our bets towards the middle when we’re uncertain, which may mean that our underlying view of the world is not as biased as it might seem.

However, unlike sound and light, the realities we’ll look at are often socially mediated and our explicit estimates have meaning to us, that we defend, and are related to other attitudes. Despite this, I find psychophysics an encouraging addition to our understanding of our misperceptions: we may not always be as wrong as we think, or, rather, our errors may not represent such a biased view of the world.

What We’re Told

The second group of factors influencing how and what we think about the world are external in origin.

First, there is the media. Whenever I present any findings from the Perils of Perception surveys at conferences, without fail the very first ‘question’ I get – sometimes shouted from the audience, while I’m still speaking – is: ‘That’ll be the Daily Mail effect!’ (if I’m in the UK) or ‘That’ll be the Fox News effect!’ (if I’m in the US) or ‘That’ll be the fake news effect!’ (when I’m presenting, well, anywhere).

‘Fake news’ as a concept quickly gained incredible traction in 2017, being named ‘Word of the Year’ by at least one dictionary publisher. But I think it’s a pretty unhelpful term, and it has only passing relevance to the types of misperceptions we’re interested in here, for a couple of reasons.

Properly defined, it’s way too small a concept. Our key misperceptions do not have their roots in entirely fabricated stories, created sometimes as clickbait to earn money for the creators and publishers or for more sinister reasons, as we’ll explore.

Even this limited use of the term has been undermined, mainly by the locus of many of the ‘real’ fake news stories, Donald Trump, as he has helped turn it into an attack phrase for both the media in general and individual reports that opponents do not agree with. The ‘2017 Fake News Awards’ hosted on the Republican Party’s website, for example, featured a perplexing array of ‘winners’, from actual errors in reporting, tweets from a journalist’s personal account that had been retracted and deleted, photographs that showed crowds as smaller than they really were, supposed faux pas on how to feed koi carp, rebuffed handshakes that turned out to be accepted – all the way up to a denial of collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

As we will see, our misperceptions are far from being just a ‘fake news effect’ – although we will look at the incredible reach and frightening levels of belief in a few of the highest profile examples of actual fake news, to highlight the broader challenge of disinformation.

While there is going to be relatively little simplistic media-bashing in our explanations, it is still a vital actor in the system creating and reinforcing misperceptions. However, the media more generally is not actually the most important root cause of our misperceptions, though it is influential: we get the media we deserve, or demand.

These days, information technology and social media present even more challenges to our perception of facts, given the extent to which we can filter and tailor what we see online, and how it is increasingly done without us even noticing or knowing it. ‘Filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ incubate our misperceptions. Unseen algorithms and our own selection biases help create our own individual realities. The pace of technological progress that is allowing this splintering is frightening, but also so apparently complex and unstoppable that it’s numbing. A very few years ago the suggestion that we would each be experiencing our own individual realities online would have seemed like a Black Mirror episode, but now it’s accepted with a shrug. That is dangerous, because it plays to some of our deepest psychological quirks – our desire to have our already held views validated and our instinctive avoidance of anything that challenges them.

In 2018, Facebook was found to have supplied the data of around 87 million users to political consultants Cambridge Analytica to target communications during the 2016 US presidential campaign and the EU Referendum vote in Britain. However, the signs are that even this shocking example did not lead to wholesale rejection of our ‘filtered world’: even at the height of coverage, and the #deletefacebook campaign, technology monitoring firms reported the worldwide usage of Facebook remained within normal, expected ranges.14

Politics and political culture also feed directly into our misperceptions. Few of us have regular, direct personal contact with serving politicians, so much of what we’re told by politicians and the government comes via the media, and the statements made by politicians gather a disproportionate amount of media coverage, particularly during key election campaigns. And in recent years we’ve had a glut of key campaigns. Both Donald Trump’s election in America and the Brexit vote in the UK were widely called out as the apogee of deceptive communications, giving birth to new phrases such as ‘alternative facts’. Yet, of course, there has never been a golden age when political communications were 100 per cent accurate, in any country. For example, in France in the mid-1600s, during the Civil War, an infamous series of pamphlets provided an outlet for justified outrage at royal suppression, alongside entirely fake accusations that Louis XIV’s chief minister Cardinal Mazarin had committed a whole series of sexual transgressions, including incest.15

Of course, it is increasingly the case that politicians do communicate directly with people through social media, with President Trump’s tweets becoming so central to his communications that his press secretary confirmed they were official announcements. As a result, some Twitter users tried suing for being blocked from seeing them, and there have even been calls to add them to the National Archive: we can rest easy, ‘covfefe’ will be preserved for future generations.16

Finally, there is that thing we call real life – what we see directly ourselves; what we hear from family, friends and colleagues; what we confront when we’re out and about in the world. Not all of our views about social realities are created from television or Twitter. But as we’ll soon see, there are significant risks from assuming that our own experience is completely typical.

*

In the following chapters I’ll take you on a tour of what we think and how we think about some of the biggest decisions facing us today, from how much money to save for retirement and how to respond to concerns about immigration, to how to encourage people to engage with global poverty. As we look at where we get things wrong, we’ll also consider how we can get things right – both as individuals and as a society. It is possible to become more aware of the realities on which our decisions rest. We don’t have to fall prey to the peril of our misperceptions.

Keep in mind these five points as you read through the chapters that follow and we explore our misperceptions and the reasons behind them:

1.   Many of us get a lot of basic social and political facts very wrong.

2.   What we get wrong is as much about how we think as what we’re told – which means, as much as we’d like to, we can’t merely blame the media, social media or politicians for our mistaken beliefs, we need to look at the whole system, including our own faulty thinking.

3.   Our misperceptions are often biased in particular directions, because our emotional responses influence our perceptions of reality. Our misperceptions therefore provide valuable clues that we shouldn’t just laugh at or ignore.

4.   More than this, our delusions can in turn shape social and political realities. They have serious consequences for so many aspects of our lives, from political outcomes, social cohesion, to our own health and finances.

5.   Acknowledging the complexity and scale of the problem is our only real chance to shift our misperceptions, individually and collectively.

I feel privileged to have worked on such a variety of fascinating studies, to be able to understand our misperceptions from many different points of view. I have no vested interest in ascribing the source of our misperceptions to one particular cause, or to conclude that only one particular action will solve it. The reality is the causes are multiple, as are the actions required.