We often overestimate how many members of minorities actually live in our country. However, this is neither a national nor a political phenomenon, but above all a general human mistake, as researchers have now shown. It comes about through the intellectual processes with which we assess proportions – and in the event of a lack of knowledge, there are often wrong. Accordingly, we regularly classify small groups than larger than they actually are, and large groups as smaller. The less we know about the demanded group.
When people are interviewed how many members of minorities live in their country, they regularly overestimate their share in the total population. For example, Americans indicate up to twice as high if they are to appreciate the proportion of African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Asians, Jews, immigrants or the LGBTQ community in the United States. In other countries, too, the proportion of foreigners is assessed higher than it is real. Most people underestimate the group size of the majority. This applies regardless of whether the respondents belong to the requested additional or minority.
According to social scientists, a possible explanation for this misconception is that the respondents perceive the minorities as a threat and lead prejudices to an incorrect assessment. Another hypothesis states that people who maintain many social contacts to members of minorities or who regularly have contact with these groups about media reports regularly. This can be done by false numbers in the reports or the frequency of the reports. But what about these explanations?
Ignorance leads to distortion towards the middle
Researchers around Brian Guay from Stony Brook University in New York have now checked this. To do this, they evaluated surveys from over 36,000 test subjects from 22 countries that have been carried out in the past 30 years. In it, the participants, among other things, gave estimates how large, in their view, different groups of ethnic and non-ethnic minorities are in their country. In some tests, you should also appreciate proportions of politically undisputed topics, for example how often the letter “A” occurs in a given text or how many people in your country have a washing machine. The researchers then compared this information with empirical data on the real proportions. They also evaluated surveys on how strong people see themselves threatened by certain groups.
The evaluation showed that the estimates are always moved towards the middle, i.e. 50 percent of the total amount. As is known, this brand separates minor and majorities and serves the respondents as the main judge. If people do not know the exact number for which they are asked, they always rate proportions of suspected minorities as larger, shares of suspected majorities systematically than smaller, so that the values are closer to the threshold of 50 percent. Accordingly, there is a general psychological pattern in our way of thinking to underestimate small percentage values to over and large shares, as the researchers explain. This leads to the frequently observed misjudgments in group sizes. This pattern applies to the assessment of proportions of any kind, not only to the percentage of minorities in the total population. “This is also referred to as ‘regression to the center’ and is a statistical law” that applies in general in the event of random rate, Hans Alves, professor of social cognition at the Ruhr University Bochum, who was not involved in the study.
General estimation defects overlaps social and political effects
This general psychological pattern explained the estimated errors in the minorities significantly better than the previous two hypotheses that explain the phenomenon of socio -psychologically or politically. Only a few of the bad perceptions could also be traced back to the perceived threat by a group or to the social contacts, as Guay and his colleagues report. The team tasted the team: The more further indications and information had people through the media or experience on the requested topic, the more they adapted their information to these expectations and the less they misjudge themselves in the suspected share. For example, members of minorities also often appreciate their own group size too large, but overall more realistic than outsiders because they know their community better.
Conversely, this effect also led to a stronger misjudgment of the situation due to this effect, misinformation and prejudices, because the information is unconsciously adapted to false expectation values. Theme-specific prejudices and perceived threats are therefore not the main cause of the misjudgments of population demography, but can increase the existing mistake. “Our findings ask researchers, journalists and experts to rethink their interpretation of false ideas about the demographic structure of society,” writes the team. At the same time, however, the findings also suggest that disinformation could distort perception and more knowledge about other population groups.
In follow -up studies, Guay and his colleagues now want to pursue the question of whether a similar phenomenon and similar mistakes in thinking also occur if we are supposed to appreciate abstract frequencies – such as how often deaths are caused by botulism or a heart attack. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025; DOI: 10.1073/PNAS.2413064122)))
Sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science Media Center