You're wrong about the percentage of minorities in the U.S.

The Week

A magnifying glass. Illustrated | iStock

What do Americans see when they look in the mirror? How do they see the country? It is troubling, though perhaps not in the way it first appears.

The poll shows that Americans underestimate the size of minority groups. What part of society are they gay and lesbian? In reality, it is about 3 percent. Bisexuals? People say 29 percent, in reality it is 4 percent. How about people who are different? It is actually more like 0.6 percent, according to those polled.

The same pattern is held for religious, as well as racial and ethnic minorities. When the actual proportions are 1 and 2 percent, the country is 27 percent Muslim and 30 percent Jewish. Native Americans make up 27 percent of the country when they are 1 percent, Asian Americans make up 29 percent when they are 6 percent, and Black Americans make up 41 percent when they are 12 percent.

When they hear about such responses, they want to know the causes of the error. No way Americans could be this ignorant! They must be messing with the pollsters to think that they are mainly a function of television and movies portraying a world in which minorities are more prevalent than they are in the real world. There are people who see the results as a reflection of paranoia and bigotry at large in the country, with the results driven mainly by ignorance and fear of the Other.

The write-up included with the polling results is persuasive. There is a chance that there is something disturbing in the results, though less about the cause of the skew than the political and cultural consequences.

According to the interpretive essay accompanying the poll by data journalist Taylor Orth, the poll's surprising findings can be explained by the concept of uncertainty-based rescaling. The process of compensation leads to a shift in the estimate of the group size. In the poll, we can see this work in the overestimation of small groups, but also in the reverse direction when people underestimate the size of larger groups.

When the actual portion of Americans with a high school degree is 89 percent, respondents in the YouGov poll think 65 percent of Americans have at least a high school degree. When the true portion is closer to 70 percent, they think 66 percent own a car, 59 percent have flown on a plane, and 58 percent are Christians.

The relative accuracy of estimates made about groups that fall close to 50 percent is confirmed by the uncertainty-based-rescaling thesis. Fifty percent of the country voted for Republicans in the last election, 55 percent are married, and 58 percent of Americans have at least one child, according to respondents.

The worry that inflated responses about minorities are driven by fear and bigotry is belied by the pollster examining answers submitted by members of certain minority groups about their own group. They were no better than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belonged to.

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52 percent of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39 percent, closer to the real figure of 12 percent. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40 percent of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31 percent, closer to the actual figure of 14 percent.

Estimation errors seem to follow from benign causes.

The tendency of people to underestimate the size of minorities when guessing about their portion of the population is quite common.

The American right has created a highly profitable model of niche media by playing on people's fears of being overrun, outnumbered, and replaced by threatening them. Depending on the news cycle, the threat varies from day to day and week to week. Sometimes it is immigrants. Sometimes it is native-born racial minorities. Gays, lesbians, and trans people are at others.

Whatever the group, the fearmongering gains traction by portraying each as a significant segment of the population on the verge of commanding enormous demographic and political power to transform the country as a whole in its image. The general tendency to exaggerate the size of minorities seems to confirm the danger of the perception of threat.

The New York Times, CNN, NPR and entertainment conglomerates devote outsized attention to these same groups because of the right's focus on the threat posed by minority groups. The aim of this news coverage and attention is to generate sympathy for these groups and to support their legal protections from persecution.

The right-wing noise machine focuses on this overabundance of mainstream-media attention to drive home its message that these groups are incredibly powerful and using their strength to manipulate influential institutions to advance their interests at the expense of what's best for ordinary people.

I think the overestimation of minority size is due to the fact that people assume minority groups are larger than they are.

The best thing mainstream media can do to counteract the right's tendency to exaggerate the size of minority groups is to remind people of their true size. Informing their audience of the facts doesn't undermine pleas for minority justice. In most cases, we are talking about a very small number of people seeking protection from harm inflicted by institutions and individuals who belong to vastly larger groups.

A little knowledge can go a long way in making a difference.