One aspect to these news ‘stories’ which never seems to be mentioned is that people surveyed are obviously being given mutiple-choice answers to choose from - unless we’re expected to believe that in the survey mentioned above, 24% of those surveyed independently came up with the ‘Bismarck’ answer, for instance.
So the question-setters include some deliberately ludicrous answers to make better news stories (19% of Britons believe we are descended from Goldfish!) thus advertising the company whose PR department commissioned the survey.
It comes up occasionally in Australia. But news stories tend to have more of a flavour of “we need to educate people about xyz” rather than “aint people stupid for thinking…”
For instance, this one about immigration (which also dobs in plenty of other countries) or this one about political apathy
You’ve never seen Talking to Americans? This was basically nothing but Rick Mercer soliciting ignorant answers to simple questions from American passers-by and politicians. For years it was a regular feature of what was probably Canada’s most popular comedy show. Then it got spun off into its own television special, and became the highest-rated one-off show in the entire history of Canadian TV.
Given this it’s hard to imagine how American media could really be pulling off the “people are clueless” thing to an even greater extent. Do they have entire channels dedicated to this sort of programming now or something?
Yeah, but that’s not “The people in our country are stupid.” That’s “The people in another country are stupid about facts related to our country.” No, there has never been an entire show in the U.S. about American stupidity, but articles in newspaper and news stories on television which describe American stupidity are semi-common. They don’t appear everyday, but I’d be surprised to go for more than a few months without seeing one of them. And there’s Jaywalking, which was a regular feature on The Tonight Show for some years. The Tonight Show was the most popular late-night show for a long time. Jaywalking was a regular sketch several times a year, I believe.
A pretty interesting international comparison I saw in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago - the US did okay on some measures but came out 13th of 14th overall:
Whereas I’d be perfectly willing to get into a shouting match with the pollster over the fact that NO, SIR, Germany does **not **lie east of France because it’s all fucking relative innit ? Depends on which way you’re going, stands to fucking reason.
But to answer the OP, yes, “a selection of random passer-bys giving retard, odd or intriguingly warped answers to straightforward questions” is of course prime TV fodder in France too ; as is “did you know that over N% of French people believe <something retarded but when you dig deeper it was a leading poll collated on the Internet> ?” articles.
Although I’ll admit we kinda like “Americans are clueless” polls better :p.
Rating the amount that the people in that poll from The Guardian were wrong by subtracting the true percentage from the guessed percentage is the wrong way to do it. The poll talks about the average guesses by people in each country about the percentage of their population that are immigrants compared with the true percentage. In the following table, I’ve put the country, the true percentage of immigrants, and the average of the guesses of that country’s people about the percentage:
Italy - 7 - 30
U.S. - 13 - 32
Belgium - 10 - 29
France - 10 - 28
Hungary - 2 - 16
Poland - .4 - 14
Canada - 21 - 35
Great Britain - 13 - 24
Spain - 12 - 23
Germany - 13 - 23
Japan - 2 - 10
South Korea - 2 - 10
Sweden - 16 - 23
Australia - 28 - 35
I think in their calculations they are using the difference in the real and the guessed percentages by subtracting. That’s not the way to do it. You should divide the guessed percentage by the real percentage. You get the following, where the last column is the factor that the guessed percentage is over the real percentage:
So if you do this by dividing instead of subtracting, Americans were eighth among these fourteen countries in terms of being wrong about the percentage of immigrants in their country. In other words, they are about average. The poll in The Guardian then does the same thing for the average guesses of the percentage of Christians in the country versus the true percentage and the averages guesses of the percentage of Moslems in the country versus the true percentage. They take the subtracted difference and not the factor in each case. They combine them in some manner to claim that people in the U.S. is the most wrong.
But that’s not true. The U.S. isn’t the worst in any of the categories if you use the factor difference and not the subtracted difference. In fact, the U.S. isn’t that bad overall. It’s about average. For truly bizarre differences, look at the table above for the factors by which Hungarians, Poles, Japanese, and Koreans are wrong about the percentages of immigrants.
Because dividing is a better way to measure error. For instance, suppose I asked someone how many people in the U.S. have died from Ebola this year and they say, “I guess about 150.” Suppose I asked them how many people have died this year from all types of influenza and they say, “I guess about 100,000.” Suppose that the true numbers are 1 and 34,807. Then they are wrong by differences of 149 and 65,193. This makes it sound like they are much worse on their guess about all influenza than their guess on Ebola. But they are wrong by factors of 150.00 and 2.87, respectively, which makes it much worse on Ebola than on all influenzas. I contend that factors give better measures than differences.
Sorry, I don’t think what you are doing makes sense.
In this case we are measurng the difference between two percentages - the answer is a simple number, which represents a percentage difference (between perception and actuality).
In this case, it doesn’t help to know that 4 times as many people thought A, when B was the case.
Suppose someone asks many people what percentage of all Americans are Jewish. They say, on average, that it’s 10%. Suppose that the actual percentage is 2%. Suppose that they also ask them what percentage of all Americans are left-handed. They say, on average, that it’s 20%. Suppose the actual percentage is 10%. Then going by differences, it looks like people tend to be more wrong about left-handedness, since it’s 10% for left-handedness and 8% for Jewishness. Going by factors, it looks like poeple tend to be more wrong about Jewishness, since it’s a factor of 5.00 for Jewishness and 2.00 for left-handedness. I think the factor measurement again works better here.
“On immigration, British people think on average that immigrants make up 24.4% of the population when it is actually about 13%, according to the 2011 census.”
The “correct” answer depends on a few things. How accurate the known figures are. This is not a given, but lets assume the official figures are roughly correct. Different people also define immigants differently. Are we talking only of first generation immigrants? Are second generation imigrants to be included, and how are we expcted to know the exact difference? Lastly, a lot will depend upon where the question is asked. Asking the question in inner London will probably give you replies on the higher end of the spectrum, asking the question to someone from Inverness will probably return replies on the low end.
No, but I can tell you that 50% of the Vice Presidents of our previous government were caught, on several occasions, citing the US Constitution instead of ours, and that the person in question has a Law degree. A Spanish one from a prestigious university, eh, not one from the University of Phoenix-on-the-Mail. I mean, in theory she’s supposed to know there is more than one Consti in the world…
We tend to get more stuff along the lines of “bloppers by specific individuals” (some of which become instant memes, such as “manda trillos(1)” or “two words: im pressive(2)”) than along the lines of general poll results. There is a certain genre of “celebrity” which seems to make a living by seeing who can come up with the stupidest thing to say.
Occasionally, there are worries such as about the % of 15yos of both sexes who think that a woman’s ideal position within marriage is “in the kitchen with a broken leg”, but they are worries about attitudes, not knowledge.
1: while Defense Minister, Federico Trillo had been the “A” part of a Q&A Congressional session. Some of the last questions were very much not to his liking but he answered correctly and professionally. As he turned to head back to his seat, having finished, he didn’t realize the microphone was still on when he said clearly (with his back turned to the cameras) “¡manda güevos!”, a rude expression meaning more or less “the nerve of that fucker!” Instant new euphemism, manda trillos.
2: said by a bullfighter with barely the minimal education level required by law, in response to some question or other.
It’s my contention that in this case you should use whichever value (real/guessed) or (guessed/real) is over 1. The U.S. is the fourth worse of the fourteen countries. One problem with doing this is that the percentages on the poll have been rounded to the nearest percent. I don’t think that the U.S. comes out the worst on this poll. What the poll shows mainly is that the citizens of none of these countries is great at guessing percentages of immigrant/Christian/Moslem people in their countries.