Bias in Self-Knowledge of Global Communities

Citizens in countries around the world dramatically overestimate the size of minority demographic groups and underestimate the size of majority groups. Media outlets and researchers have concluded that this pattern of errors is a result of characteristics of individual and societal distortions, such as the level of threat the group is imagined to pose and the amount of exposure someone has with the group. More recent work suggests that this error is a direct consequence of the psychological transformation of estimates under uncertainty. However, no work to date has provided an explanation for how distortion and uncertainty might jointly interact to produce people's estimates. The goal of the current paper is to reconcile distortion and uncertainty-based accounts by providing a model that applies Bayesian inference to incorrect source information (presumed to result from external misinformation, or societal or individual distortions). We then apply that model to a broad set of international survey data and explore the cross-national structure of misestimation in expressed beliefs across a wide variety of topics. The results suggest that people are overall less and differently impacted by distortions than previous research has found, and that these distortions are often widely shared across quite distinct countries and groups.