America’s Perception Gaps Are Frightening
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Americans’ perceptions of reality are wildly off. I noted in the video that a big reason is media narratives. But it’s not the only reason. Let’s break down the five big reasons reality is distorted and apply them to some of our biggest misperceptions.
First, here’s the original chart from YouGov America:
There are at least five reasons for these differences:
- Media narratives (details below)
- Data collection – as with many surveys and polls, data collection can be difficult and populations, unrepresentative. Unless I trust the methodology, I take them with a grain of salt.
- Education – Americans aren’t exactly Rhodes Scholars. We’re a wildly diverse bunch, ranging from Young Sheldon to Young Frankenstein. Credit or blame goes to a mercurial mix of talent, effort, upbringing, and institutions.
- Interests & biases – Everyone gravitates to what interests them. I’ve hired people for the same job, but each prioritized entirely different tasks. Same goes for information diets. The biggest NBA nerd might know Lebron’s daily assists, but have no clue or interest in how many Americans—or Lebron’s teammates—might be gay. More nefariously, our resentments and biases taint the info we do consume. A single, triggering data point will consume far more mental real estate than justified by the real world. Somewhere right now, there’s a guy raging about ‘illegals’ or Jews in some town that has neither.
- Aspirations – people often respond to surveys based on how they want to see themselves (noble or smart) versus how they might really be (ignorant or petty). (This one applies least to this survey because there’s not a big aspirational component here.)
Media Narratives
It’s clear that the more often we’re bombarded with an idea, perspective, or set of words, the more we’re likely to internalize it, especially if it’s from a trusted source—or common in our social circle. I remembered how strange it was hearing a friend of mine to refer to her own five-year old son as “white-presenting”.
She’s hardly alone. Few appreciate how an entire new language, conjured by academia, was pounded into us, relentlessly, by corporate media. Did modern-day America suddenly become a vicious den of bigotry? Or, did we get turned on each other? Look at the sudden spike around 2013 of prejudice-adjacent terminology by the New York Times and Washington Post:
They’re hardly the only culprits, but representative of the activism that replaced journalism and damaged trust in legacy media.
Though in the video I said our misperceptions aren’t political — on the part of respondents, they are ideological. Behind each term was a radical agenda, weaponized to seize power. It nearly worked. Within a few short years, adherents rammed an entirely new language and divisive ideology into nearly every corporate, government, and academic entity. It was an administrative coup, whose excesses and coercion triggered the (over)correction we’re in now.
I assigned a likely primary (sometimes secondary and tertiary) reason to each response with a 20%+ gap. The ones highlighted are likely media-driven. What they have in common is identities that have become politicized, weaponized, and amplified by media activism, well beyond their demographic reality. They now occupy prime mental real estate that might otherwise be used for something silly like, learning a skill, playing with our kids, or getting along with Grandpa.
Most others deltas can be attributed to education or personal preferences/biases. One, reading books, might be a data collection issue. It relies on reading stats from other surveys that might be aspirational. Reading is dying and the estimated number is likely closer to reality. But I’ll save that for a future newsletter.
The most disturbing part is these perception gaps are baked into the logic of our society. Every vote, every business decision, every interview question, every social interaction, gets filtered through this distorted lens. Our perception gaps are both a cause and effect of our toxic reality.
AI Legacy
These distortions don’t die with Buzzfeed—or at the hands of MAGA. Many of those coding AI algorithms are cut from the same cloth as journactivists who stoked identitarianism, and training it on the same content. Who can forget Google Gemini’s Black and Vietnamese Founding Fathers?
Look at this ChatGPT result:
When asked to choose a presidential candidate, note the terms ChatGPT used in its first two reasons for choosing Kamala Harris: “Inclusivity” “diverse” “racial, economic, and social equity” “climate change” “healthcare expansion, and education reform” “sustainability” “environmental and social equity”.
If you flood cyberspace with one particular worldview, don’t be surprised when algorithms trained on it, spit it back in your face. The very logic of the future is built on some wild and shaky foundations.