What can our misperceptions tell us about the value of trust and expertise?
Bobby Duffy (King’s College London)
What percentage of teenage women and girls give birth each year? Is violent crime increasing or decreasing in your country? What proportion of your country are immigrants or Muslim? We're often very wrong about the most basic social realities. Whether it’s regarding our societies and how they’re changing, the state of the world today or supposedly common knowledge, our own biases and the messages we receive can lead to perceptions that are sometimes extremely at odds with reality.
In (opens in a new window)The Perils of Perception, Duffy draws on over 100,000 interviews across 40 countries to uncover our misconceptions. In this ‘post-truth age’, we tend to think of our current era as uniquely ill- informed and beset by ‘fake news’. But this is a longstanding interaction between ‘how we think’ and ‘what we’re told.’ These misperceptions and the underlying causes they point to have important implications for how we understand trust, polarisation and identity.