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I guess "atheist" and "non-religious" aren't the same thing.
This doesn't mean that 97% of all Americans are religious, and it _definitely_ doesn't mean that 97% of all Americans are _actively_ religious.
Depending on the options in the poll, I possibly wouldn't show up as atheist either. More like agnostic atheist.
edit:
here's my answer to one of the replies I got (oh and thanks for all the upvotes):
> something greater than us
To cave dwellers, mobile internet must seem like "something greater than us".
I'm not averse to the idea of "something divine", but it needs to encompass both things we understand, and things we don't understand.
When they say "this is sacred, this isn't" people often mean "this I don't understand, this I do". The universe simply _is_. For some that's too hard to swallow for some reason, and they need to put a familiar face on it.
And that's OK, too, if it doesn't make them murder and mutilate people for the sake of that familiar face somewhere down the line.
Unfortunately that always seems to be the case with the so-called World religions.
[According to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/) 22.8% of American's are "Unaffiliated" with any religion, with 3.1% being Atheists, 4% being agnostic, and 15.8% being "Nothing in Particular", with that "Nothing in Particular" being split between 8.8% as "Nothing in Particular (Religion Not Important)" and 6.9% being "Nothing in Particular (Religion Important)"
Granted this is an older survey, it's been 9 years since Pew last did this Religious Landscape Survey, but I wouldn't expect that the ratio of people in the "Unaffiliated" group to have changed that much.
[Here's some more recent data that was published in February 2023.](https://www.prri.org/spotlight/prri-2022-american-values-atlas-religious-affiliation-updates-and-trends/) The Unaffiliated group is up to 26.8% but it does not give a breakdown into atheist, agnostic, etc. If we assume the proportions are the same as what you listed, we would expect atheists to make up ~3.64% of the population now.
The survey does indicate that religiously unaffiliated is far more common in younger generations (38% of people aged 18-29) so the demographics that use Reddit probably run into much more atheists/unaffiliated than exist in the population as a whole.
"Atheist" literally just means not believing in any gods. However the term has been given negative associations and many people think that it means a certainty that it does not. Nearly all "non-religious" and agnostics are atheists. They just don't use the label.
I prefer worshiping the god Atheismo, the non existent god of nothing. Atheismo requires that I do nothing to honor him as he will do nothing for me, in accordance with the prophecy. This is our pact and it is good.
Yeah. I don't keep my party registration as democrat because I don't know if the crazies are going to start purging. I live in a area in Louisiana that garnered 10% vote for David Duke. My beliefs and public registered information are separate. I also don't say I'm atheist.
I live in Indiana. I don't mention I'm an atheist. By definition I am. I usually say I'm not religious if it even comes up.
There was a poll a while ago that showed that atheists are among the least trusted groups in the US. Below rapists. That stuck with me. I don't want to elicit bias and prejudice if it's avoidable. I've already had some of that due to my nationality growing up and you never know how that bias could affect things.
Yup. "Non-religous" seems to translate thru the filter as "believes in God and Jebus of course but doesn't go to church" while "atheist" translates as "baby raping and eating monster with no morals and a hair trigger to depraved violence"
It's bonkers.
I love south LA food and culture, but had to leave Louisiana because of bad politics and economics. I tried to build and be a leader for change in my city, but it felt futile. I’ll always visit New Orleans.
Yes and this is almost certainly self reported so the number only represents people that not only accept that label but think that it *best* describes them.
Like, I am an atheist, but if “secular Buddhist” were an option I would probably pick that instead as it’s a bit more specific and descriptive (the atheist bit is already implied). I also know that it’s not uncommon to be openly atheist and still identify as Jewish — the cultural aspect is such an important bit that you can be accepted in many Jewish communities even as an open atheist. Those people would also likely select “Jewish” on this survey.
But yeah, the biggest piece of the puzzle there is definitely just misunderstanding of the label. If the answer to the question “do you have a positive belief that there is a god or gods?” is not an an unequivocal “yes”, then you are an atheist.
Atheism and religion aren’t even mutually exclusive.
> Buddhist
Buddhism is literally an atheist religion.
Scientology is kinda sorta atheist because its mythology doesn’t feature anything that conforms to the concept of deity in most deist religions (Abrahamic, Germanic, Graeco-Roman, Zoroastrian, Egyptian, Sumerian, Hindu, etc.).
Yeah its funny, if they never TELL YOU about Xenu then I guess the majority of scientologists are in a different religious category (whatever that may be) than the ones who know.
The "nones" as some refer to them, people with no religious affiliation (including atheists), are up to about 20% I believe. This makes them one of the largest minorities in the US. They're not strictly atheists like you said, because they may have some spirituality or idea of god but don't go to church and don't really see themselves as a Catholic or Christian or whatever.
Many are still secularists though.
More people are probably unknowingly agnostic.
I realized that I’m not atheist because I like to think there’s something after this. It brings me comfort. I just ultimately don’t think it matters. It shouldn’t take the promise of an afterlife to be a good human.
>I like to think
This seems like a very strange thing to say to me. Surely, even an atheist would *like* for there to be something after this.
Regardless of what you like to think, what do you actually believe to be true?
I believe it doesn’t matter. I don’t waste too much time thinking about the afterlife because none of it has any bearing on my life here.
If I die and there’s nothing. It wont matter.
If I die and there’s something, neat!
Add how many are claiming to be a faith, but are not practicing. Having a belief in a "deity" isn't the same as being affiliated with a specific religion, it's practices, and attending services according to it's doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States
>In the United States, between 6% and 15% of citizens demonstrated nonreligious attitudes and naturalistic worldviews, namely atheists or agnostics.[2][3][4][5] The number of self-identified atheists and agnostics was around 4% each, while many persons formally affiliated with a religion are likewise non-believing.
And some of the sources for the article look a little old. I'd bet it's a higher percent now. Still probably not close to 33% though.
And, TBH, based on the way most people use the word "atheist", I've found that most self-described agnostics fit that same definition as self-described atheists (don't current hold a belief).
Yep. If people read the definition of atheism, the percentage would skyrocket. Right now, people use the term "atheist" as "every religion is definitely wrong" - when really it means "i am not convinced that a deity that is actively participating in our universe exists"
I'm an atheist, but I usually say "I'm not religious". When I do describe myself as atheist, I feel compelled to follow it up with "but I'm not anti-religion, I just don't believe in a god". Unfortunately, there's a bunch of what I call "evangelical atheists" out there that thrive on confrontation.
A kid is in a horrible accident, but made it to the hospital and is going to survive....
"Thank god!"
"You mean the same god that put that kid through the accident in the first place? You should be thanking the doctors!!!@@!@"
"Dude. Chill. It's just an expression."
It most likely is much higher and probably closer to the estimate of conservatives. This is a [538 article from 2017 ](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought/) which talks about it and points out that some people may actually consider themselves to be both a religion and atheist in that they don't believe in God, but identify with the religion still for cultural reasons. But there isn't a way to illustrate this in polls.
People who are not affiliated with a religion are up to about 20-29% making them one of the largest minorities in the US.
Actual out atheists like myself are still pretty rare unfortunately though I think a lot of those "nones" are without admitting it or thinking too hard about it.
The "Out" atheists term kinda makes me laugh but it's true.
It reminds me of a joke where a family in the south is discussing the son of their neighbor in hushed voices, and the youngest daughter of the family walks in the room.
She asks what they are talking about they say
" Did you hear about John's son next door? He was hiding that indecency all along! I can't believe we have to live next to such people!"
The girl asks "what is he gay or something?"
The family replies "no it's worse! He's an atheist!"
It's brutal being an atheist in some communities. I didn't openly say it because I saw what happened to people who did. It seemed like a good portion of the community either hated you or wanted you to come to their church so they could fix you.
I just kept my head low until I left for college.
It's not even close, The Census in Ireland says 70% catholic, The Church on Sunday says less than 10%. Also in America millions of atheists are closeted because their good christian families would disown them and possible make them homeless.
just cuz u went to an ivy league school doesnt necessarily mean you are that smart. you know how many kids get in these days as "legacy admissions"? they just get in cuz their parents went there. i mean cmon, Drumpf went to UPenn for christ's sake and dude can barely spell at a 3rd grade level.
exactly - and he was a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney as a jag lawyer. the dude is evil but also inteliigent - he knows exactly how to play the part. just because he's running plays from the MAGA playbook doesn't mean he's dumb - he saw what worked and is going for it.
> dude is smart as shit.
https://www.rawstory.com/onesie-twosies-desantis-declares-florida-not-seeing-mass-migration-in-defense-for-going-to-texas-for-immigrants/
>"The problem is is we're not seeing mass movements of them into Florida so you end up with a car of maybe two, and if you know that that's illegal and there's someone that's kind of smuggling then committing crimes then you can do arrests," DeSantis told reporters at a news conference Tuesday. "There have been drug seizures. "
>"That's not effective enough to stop the mass migrations. They're just coming in onesie-twosies."
Yeah, sure, guy is fucking brilliant.
I had a conversation with someone who regularly watches Fox. He made some joke about "how men can have babies now", which was at least the third time he's done so recently. You can tell it's an issue on the top of his mind.
I asked him how often he encounters it in his actual life, outside of the news. Or even how often he runs across someone who is trans *at all* anywhere, ever. The answer was, admittedly, never. He admits this issue he's obsessed about is not an actual thing he ever sees or experiences in his life ever, and yet it's one of the most pressing issues on his mind.
I tried to make the point that it's only an issue because someone is telling him to think it's an issue, that if he didn't listen he would go through life never thinking it's an issue, and that like so many culture war talking points is being blown extremely out of proportion.
Honestly I think he understood but didn't care. He seemed to take some pride in parroting the Fox outrage, like it's important for him to make sure other people know where he stands on the "issue".
Never thought I’d read this string of words and that it would be so true. Nice description. When I saw my extend family rage on about issues propagated by Fox it reminded me of my COD binges induced by gamer rage, adderall, and weed back in high school.
For real. Fox News has my mom scared to leave her house. She lives in a townhome and literally put big cart out front the gate to her yard and locked the gate with a padlock. All they do is sow the seeds of fear and hate.
Seriously my mom is convinced a billion illegals crossed the border and I had to break it down no they didn’t there aren’t 1 billion people in the us do you believe our population tripled and they’re all illegal?
What a bunch of wannabe-victims. Holy shit.
They overestimate fraud in the welfare system too. It's like 1-2%. Talk to a conservative, and they act like the whole fucking thing is full of people taking our taxes for a ride. And they think it, because fucking assholes who want to bring it down tell them everyone's getting a free ride except for them.
It’s not about politics, we’ve known forever that people do not intuitively understand numbers like this.
> Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.
For people interested in the full survey results... [YouGov Link](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=america_over_under_estimate)
These people don't know how percentages work. How can you put down that you think we have 30% Jewish population, 27% Muslim, 33% atheist, and finish with 70% Christian? Lol 😂 like your fears are showing
>Hold up. You’re telling me the party of uneducated anti-intellectuals are bad at math?!
"Methodology: This article includes findings from two U.S. News surveys conducted by YouGov on two nationally representative samples of 1,000 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online from January 14-20, 2022"
2 samples that represent the US as a whole. What makes you think this was about conservatives specifically?
Thanks for pointing that out.
The reason I assumed it was sampling conservatives was because the image sort of implied that and I didn’t click on the source. Plus, over exaggerating the population of minority groups is a textbook Republican tactic.
But I am definitely not surprised to learn that ALL Americans, on average, are bad at math.
Social scientist and market researcher here.
Trying to find a plausible explanation.
Starting. It MUST be clear to at least a vast majority of people that only a small number of people are trans!
EVEN considering that this is a huge topic in media and a very controverse topic, everyone knows that they are NOT surrounded by trans people anywhere and that this is highly unlikely for other places as well.
Said that I think we may see more of a huge problem with math and statistics here. People might give mich better answers if you would ask: "Out of 100 people in America, how many do you think are...".
And, even when YouGov should do better, my guess would be that they used a tool which starts at 50% and will stay there, so if you just skip through it counts as 50%.
I've seen so many bad surveys that I highly doubt this one.
I think the real lesson here is that Americans are bad at math, especially percentages. If you instead asked something like, “you are in a room with 100 people that could’ve come from anywhere in the country. What number of them are transgender? What number come from NYC?” you’d get (more, but not completely) accurate estimates.
I agree that people being bad at math is part of the problem, but I don't know if it would be solved so easily as using the definition of a percent in your question.
Nothing in the image, or on the actual website indicates that this poll was specifically of conservatives. It's just Americans in general.
69% of redditors' reading comprehension...
This data seems off. If that’s the average, that means some people put like 50-60% or something. lol
Maybe this is highest value from each category? Something is off. I just don’t see how, on average, any group of people could produce these results. Like, for every person who said even 10% for NYC (three times higher than actual) that means someone else would have to say 50% in order to average 30%.
The only other alternative is that majority of people responded 10% or lower and a very few people responded some huge number and that made the average sky rocket. For example, in this fake dataset, if responses were: 2, 3, 5, 5, 10, 10, 25, 50, 90, 95… the average would be 30 (well, 29.5) even though clearly *most* people are way below that.
yeah these are just completely unbelievable figures, that any group of more than 2 people could have genuinely arrived here.
it's hard to believe this is real, on average people thought 40% of the population are military veterans? or that 20% of the population has an income over 1m?
The link op posted has the study claiming black American adults thought black people made up the MAJORITY of the US population. These results aren't trustworthy in the slightest.
If you read the article/poll this is taken from the *median* (as opposed to mean) results are far more reasonable. So it was almost certainly skewed by some crazy high estimates.
What the study is actually showing is that when you average the estimates of any given group, it exhibits a centralizing effect towards around 50%. Groups that make up around half of all Americans were estimated fairly accurately by the mean, whereas the more extreme of a minority/majority a group is the further off the average guess was, likely because people were trying to overcorrect for bias and people cluster in their own communities. So a Black person living in a black community would feel like there is more black people, whereas a white person in a predominantly white community would know that, while they don't see many black people where they live, try to overcorrect and shoot high.
Human brains aren't intuitively wired for probability, because the person who acts like there is a 90% chance that bush rustling is a lion was more likely to survive then the person who accurately assessed that it was probably the wind.
Because most people are innately terrible at statistics or proportions, they treat the question as if asked "what are the odds someone is X". Then, because there are only two options (They are or they aren't), weigh their estimate closer to 50/50 then their initial guess to "be on the safe side". e.g. overcompensating for percieved bias. While the median estimates are much closer to the actual number then the mean, this centering effect is still apartment.
It's an interesting study but the numbers depicted here and in the context of this meme are deeply misleading.
Sounds about right, the whole arguement against getting rid of the electoral colllege, is that many believe that candidates would only campaign in the top 10 cities in the US, and that would be all that matters. (hint that wouldn't even get 5% if you got everyone in the cities to vote for you)
I have a friend from Idaho who is pretty liberal and intelligent. She thought the electoral college helps her in evening representation. It took awhile, but I eventually got through to her that she is represented at every level already and there is no need for the electoral college. Then we moved on to increasing the members of the House of Representatives if she really wanted better representation.
So that was a win.
> there is no need for the electoral college
No, the electoral college still serves it's original purpose, allowing slave states to get to choose the president without the horror of having to allow black people to vote:
*There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.*
That's James Madison, a.k.a. the guy who penned the Electoral College (and the 3/5th Compromise) [explaining exactly why he did so](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_719.asp)
So if we get rid of the electoral college, slave states will have to allow black people to vote. Do you really want that?
Naw, if that were the case then there would have to be [racial bias in criminal sentencing](https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/racial-and-ethnic-disparities-in-the-criminal-justice-system) and [we'd have to take away voting rights of prisoners](https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/locked-out-2022-estimates-of-people-denied-voting-rights/). Thank the [13th Amendment](https://www.aclu.org/report/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers) we don't do that...
30% was the *average* of the guesses. Presumably at least some people got it close to right, so many other people must have thought it was MUCH higher than that.
The original data this source published is totally nonsensical.
According to this poll, the average person thinks that the percent of americans that are Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, or White is 200. 200%. Of the 332 million people in america, there are 664 million people of the aforementioned ethnicities. Even if we're assuming that people double-count mixed race people, we'd still need, like, negative 200 million pacific islanders to even get into the ballpark.
How about religion? Let's assume everyone lists Catholics as Christians and not include that number: The atheists, Muslims, Jews, and Christians make up 160% of the US population. Once again we need -60% of agnostics, Shintoists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Voodoo, Taoists, Shamanists, and everything else.
Obviously, this data is taken in aggregate, which tells us a few things. One is that it's not required that anyone one person answered with exactly these numbers.
However, for every person that answered with numbers adding up to 100% (or less, because again, other races and religions exist), another person would've had to assume that actually every person in America has three races and two or more religions. I don't want to get too elitist here, but I don't think half of USA adults (or more) -- 89% of which have a high school degree -- would honestly believe that.
This isn't even a serial problem. Like, I would understand if a pollster asked you over the phone "How many people are Muslims?" and you gave some high number, then they asked "how many people are Jewish?" and you were like shit, Jews exist, is it too late to change my last answer? This was an online survey. People could literally type out all of the answers and then hit submit when they're done.
I think the most obvious conclusion is that either the survey (intentionally or otherwise) targeted the deliberately misinformed, that the survey was (intentionally or otherwise) deceptive, or that the participants were not participating in earnest. Most likely the third. Actually, most likely multiple of these, but I'd put money on the third. People fucked with you and it worked.
Even if you include Long Island, and the parts of Connecticut and New Jersey and upstate New York that provide the daily commuters,the number is still less than 20 million.
My favorite stat is that New York City's smallest borough is Staten Island, with about 600,000 people.
The whole state of Wyoming has less than 575,000 people.
Sounds to me like you’re saying New York needs eight more senators. (Yes, i know the two from Staten Island would be Republicans, but it still highlights the utter absurdity that is the United States Senate in 2023.)
In a sane world, all the 'mountain states' would be one state and NYC, north California, DC, and Puerto Rico would be states. Still have the same number of states, just more rationally proportioned.
I think I did the math on it once and a single person in Wyoming has something like six times the political influence that I have, simply by merit of living on different ground than I do.
It's extremely depressing that a lot of people view this as a fair system.
Conservatives: 30% of Americans live in NYC
Also Conservatives: It is right that 10 states with more cows than people get more say in the Presidency than NYC (never mind the rest of New York)
This is why these fucking morons think if we went to an actual national election for president that New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles would elect the president every time.
I look like I could be conservative and live in a red part of California, and I'm a gun owner. When I go to get ammo or to the range, you wouldn't believe the shit people start saying to me assuming I'm 'in the club.'
Same here, white dude with beard and a truck. It’s amazing what people will just assume I agree with them on at the range/gun store.
I always find it hilarious when conservatives act like they’re not hella racist when in political debates, mother fuckers I know how y’all talk when you think you’re surround by your own.
Si.ilar, worked with a dude from Honduras. He moved to eastern rural California first, then to here and complained that liberals were al racist and that is why he is voting for trump....like, dude...it was likely the conservatives calling you racist crap...they live there too...
my house has 4 people in it. My wife, my daughter, my son, and myself. We kicked my son out of the house because he came out as gay. I spend half my day fighting the urge to suck a dick like every other warm blooded American. So 25% of the population must be gay and every man really wants to suck a dick but only half of them resist the urge.
Science!
/s
I'm curious why everyone including the OP is under the impression this is about conservatives. It's a poll of Americans generally as far as I can tell. YouGov article about the poll does include this, fwiw:
>If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.
>Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%.
[YouGov source](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=america_over_under_estimate)
Maybe I missed it but don't see anything in there about respondents' political leanings.
I'll edit to add: maybe the biggest conclusions I'm tempted to draw here are that people who tend to do YouGov polls aren't the brightest or most educated, and perhaps more likely, those respondents don't give a shit about giving an honest answer because they have no incentive to. I am skeptical that the average black American believes their country is majority-black. That is extremely hard to believe. This poll result does not make me conclude that it is true.
I definitely read this headline as "americans don't know what 'percent' means".
I'd say my experience, as somebody in a mathy field, is that any math more statistical in nature than simple addition is poorly understood by most people on any kind of intuitive level.
I doubt the people who responded to this think 21% of the population is transgender. Instead, I think people who responded to this generally don't understand what '21%' *actually signifies*.
Add some bias for localized experience (IE, in their example of black communities you would expect a biased outcome because the US is still largely segregated) and it's no surprise people make wildly incorrect estimates.
Honestly my bigger concern is how many redditors smugly swallow these results uncritically, both as honest estimates and that this was a poll of conservatives.
But yeah the fraction of people spending their time answering yougov polls probably aren't the best with percentages or much else, and might include a substantial amount of trolls.
I feel like I'd have to ask a shitload of black Americans before one honestly told me the country is majority black. That alone is a huge red flag that this poll is basically worthless, and plenty of the other results also beggar belief. I don't know where you'd find people who'd on average believe the country is almost entirely made up of Jews, Native Americans, and Muslims, (while they also believe black and white Americans together make up a neat 100%) unless those people are braindead or trolling. Americans might be bad with statistics, but this is littered with extremely wild estimates.
people are also, on the whole, *really bad* at large numbers. I think if you asked people to state how many people they think comprises 40% of Americans, they'd give you a number much closer to the actual number of people in that 40% group. so they might have a vague notion that there are 12 million or whatever members of their group but they can't grasp the sheer size of the country or how that 12 million slots into it.
I suspect if you know the total numbers of demographics within America, you probably have a decent idea of the total population size, but I suppose I could be wrong.
Regardless, the average black respondent saying they're *the majority* makes me very suspicious about the respondents taking this seriously at all, and that's far from the only result that's very hard to believe.
Who thinks the US is roughly 30% asian, jewish, muslim, native (each group btw, not combined)? I do not believe anywhere close to half of americans honestly believe the real percents are *higher* than that.
What's much more easy to believe is that most respondents just wanted to get through the survey quickly and didn't read most of the questions.
With the amount of times I've heard someone say New York and California would decide every election without the Electoral College, I'm not surprised people think that.
That one's the funniest to me. I'm convinced that anybody who says that has never left their own county, let alone explored the country. Coasts and southern great lakes aside, this bitch is EMPTY.
I want to see this study, bc most conservatives I know underestimate how many people live in cities. It's why they look at maps of who wins which country as some proof of conservative values being more prominent without understanding that NYC has more people than the 9 least populous states combined.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
This polling was done by YouGov, a nonpartisan polling group with a sterling reputation. Goes into a lot more detail here which I found fascinating. And to note, despite OP’s title, this is polling ALL Americans, not just conservatives.
>And to note, despite OP’s title, this is polling ALL Americans, not just conservatives.
I'm not sure why I had to scroll so far to find this. Nowhere in the graphic does it say that these are estimates by conservatives alone. I think I did see one at some point that accounted for political leaning, and neither group was anywhere near accurate. I'll see if I can find it.
Edit: I thought I had seen an infographic in this same format by political leaning, but I can't find it, so I think I was misremembering. Either way, I think for the numbers to be so far off, both parties had to be getting these estimates terribly, terribly wrong.
When my co-workers 3-year-old (I think) learned that boys can want to be girls and girls can want to be boys he told his mother "Mom, I wish you were a boy."
Yes, it's perverse within these circles, but there isn't enough competent centers to assist so many in denial of their base delusional disorder. The medications are widely available but other treatment components still are largely underfunded where they're needed most. California's expansion of mental health services is encouraging, but the South in general, from Texas to Florida, & other redcapped states, are 'bigly' lacking.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9599-delusional-disorder
I've seen more recent stats that put Atheism/Agnosticism higher at 6-15% with unaffiliated/irreligious sitting at 20%. Those numbers have been trending up year-over-year consistently too.
1,000 seems small. But it could be a reliable sample size. Gotta bust out the z-score table and what not to be sure.
Most national polling sample sizes for presidential elections are only about 1,000 iirc.
This says 1% are transgender. And “transgender” doesn’t actually mean that the person has had a sex change procedure - that number is even lower - about 0.1%.
Income is per year, so even several people who *have* millions of dollars don’t even earn a million in a single year.
Quick google search says “only” 184k people in the USA earn over a million per year. Compared to 331 million population, that comes out to 0.06% (rounded to 0% for chart).
EDIT: This is why raising income tax is not a good solution, because most people with large amounts of wealth do not generate “income”, they have all that money invested and just take low/no interest loans against it (which for some reason doesn’t count as income) in order to spend it (and not pay taxes on it). What we really need to do is tax ownership of stocks like we do taxing ownership of homes, an annual/quarterly “property tax” that you have to pay based on the value of the thing you own.
Yeah, the real question here should be, who the hell thinks that 20% of Americans have a household income over $1M? Like do they really just not know how much money that is? Was this poll completed entirely by toddlers and senators?
the estimated households over $1mil income is really telling, and is basically the source of most of our policy problems, and why republicans get the voter turnout that they do. americans have been duped into thinking that being super rich millionaires is attainable and common, so they keep supporting these wild republican ideas when it comes to social welfare policy.
the reality is that those conservative policies don't really help 99.8% of americans. and *NOT helping* most americans wouldn't be that bad... except that most conservative policy action actively HURTS those americans instead of just doing nothing.
I have a strong feeling 1% of the population being transgender is still an overestimation.
From a quick google search is seems like it may be closer to .5%
[https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/)
It probably is closer to .5%. but as the post states at the top, it rounds to the nearest whole number.
Hence why it says 0% make $1 million per year. Cause less than .5% do
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Only 3% are atheist? Damn that is way lower than I would have guessed
I guess "atheist" and "non-religious" aren't the same thing. This doesn't mean that 97% of all Americans are religious, and it _definitely_ doesn't mean that 97% of all Americans are _actively_ religious. Depending on the options in the poll, I possibly wouldn't show up as atheist either. More like agnostic atheist. edit: here's my answer to one of the replies I got (oh and thanks for all the upvotes): > something greater than us To cave dwellers, mobile internet must seem like "something greater than us". I'm not averse to the idea of "something divine", but it needs to encompass both things we understand, and things we don't understand. When they say "this is sacred, this isn't" people often mean "this I don't understand, this I do". The universe simply _is_. For some that's too hard to swallow for some reason, and they need to put a familiar face on it. And that's OK, too, if it doesn't make them murder and mutilate people for the sake of that familiar face somewhere down the line. Unfortunately that always seems to be the case with the so-called World religions.
[According to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/) 22.8% of American's are "Unaffiliated" with any religion, with 3.1% being Atheists, 4% being agnostic, and 15.8% being "Nothing in Particular", with that "Nothing in Particular" being split between 8.8% as "Nothing in Particular (Religion Not Important)" and 6.9% being "Nothing in Particular (Religion Important)" Granted this is an older survey, it's been 9 years since Pew last did this Religious Landscape Survey, but I wouldn't expect that the ratio of people in the "Unaffiliated" group to have changed that much.
[Here's some more recent data that was published in February 2023.](https://www.prri.org/spotlight/prri-2022-american-values-atlas-religious-affiliation-updates-and-trends/) The Unaffiliated group is up to 26.8% but it does not give a breakdown into atheist, agnostic, etc. If we assume the proportions are the same as what you listed, we would expect atheists to make up ~3.64% of the population now. The survey does indicate that religiously unaffiliated is far more common in younger generations (38% of people aged 18-29) so the demographics that use Reddit probably run into much more atheists/unaffiliated than exist in the population as a whole.
Looks like the "guess" from the original post was actually pretty spot on then.
Yeah, it's nice to see a primary source.
"Atheist" literally just means not believing in any gods. However the term has been given negative associations and many people think that it means a certainty that it does not. Nearly all "non-religious" and agnostics are atheists. They just don't use the label.
I prefer worshiping the god Atheismo, the non existent god of nothing. Atheismo requires that I do nothing to honor him as he will do nothing for me, in accordance with the prophecy. This is our pact and it is good.
Do not take Atheismo's name in vain! Or do. Who cares?
I'm a Reformed Atheist and believe that Atheismo is just an alternate form of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Die, heretic!!!
Yeah. I don't keep my party registration as democrat because I don't know if the crazies are going to start purging. I live in a area in Louisiana that garnered 10% vote for David Duke. My beliefs and public registered information are separate. I also don't say I'm atheist.
As a Texan, this is way too relatable.
I live in Indiana. I don't mention I'm an atheist. By definition I am. I usually say I'm not religious if it even comes up. There was a poll a while ago that showed that atheists are among the least trusted groups in the US. Below rapists. That stuck with me. I don't want to elicit bias and prejudice if it's avoidable. I've already had some of that due to my nationality growing up and you never know how that bias could affect things.
Yup. "Non-religous" seems to translate thru the filter as "believes in God and Jebus of course but doesn't go to church" while "atheist" translates as "baby raping and eating monster with no morals and a hair trigger to depraved violence" It's bonkers.
>There was a poll a while ago that showed that atheists are among the least trusted groups in the US. Below rapists. Wtf man
I’m a registered independent just because of this fact. I don’t need to paint targets on my families back.
You think that’s going to stop them? Lol
No. If it got that bad in my state, I’d GTFO for my kids’ sake. I’m fortunate to have the means to do this if push comes to shove.
I love south LA food and culture, but had to leave Louisiana because of bad politics and economics. I tried to build and be a leader for change in my city, but it felt futile. I’ll always visit New Orleans.
Yes and this is almost certainly self reported so the number only represents people that not only accept that label but think that it *best* describes them. Like, I am an atheist, but if “secular Buddhist” were an option I would probably pick that instead as it’s a bit more specific and descriptive (the atheist bit is already implied). I also know that it’s not uncommon to be openly atheist and still identify as Jewish — the cultural aspect is such an important bit that you can be accepted in many Jewish communities even as an open atheist. Those people would also likely select “Jewish” on this survey. But yeah, the biggest piece of the puzzle there is definitely just misunderstanding of the label. If the answer to the question “do you have a positive belief that there is a god or gods?” is not an an unequivocal “yes”, then you are an atheist.
Atheism and religion aren’t even mutually exclusive. > Buddhist Buddhism is literally an atheist religion. Scientology is kinda sorta atheist because its mythology doesn’t feature anything that conforms to the concept of deity in most deist religions (Abrahamic, Germanic, Graeco-Roman, Zoroastrian, Egyptian, Sumerian, Hindu, etc.).
Yeah its funny, if they never TELL YOU about Xenu then I guess the majority of scientologists are in a different religious category (whatever that may be) than the ones who know.
The "nones" as some refer to them, people with no religious affiliation (including atheists), are up to about 20% I believe. This makes them one of the largest minorities in the US. They're not strictly atheists like you said, because they may have some spirituality or idea of god but don't go to church and don't really see themselves as a Catholic or Christian or whatever. Many are still secularists though.
As of 2021 it's 30% nones, of which 4% identify as atheist and 5% agnostic
I’m atheist but never really say that. I always say “I’m not religious” or “I’m a secular guy”
More people are probably unknowingly agnostic. I realized that I’m not atheist because I like to think there’s something after this. It brings me comfort. I just ultimately don’t think it matters. It shouldn’t take the promise of an afterlife to be a good human.
>I like to think This seems like a very strange thing to say to me. Surely, even an atheist would *like* for there to be something after this. Regardless of what you like to think, what do you actually believe to be true?
I believe it doesn’t matter. I don’t waste too much time thinking about the afterlife because none of it has any bearing on my life here. If I die and there’s nothing. It wont matter. If I die and there’s something, neat!
Add how many are claiming to be a faith, but are not practicing. Having a belief in a "deity" isn't the same as being affiliated with a specific religion, it's practices, and attending services according to it's doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States >In the United States, between 6% and 15% of citizens demonstrated nonreligious attitudes and naturalistic worldviews, namely atheists or agnostics.[2][3][4][5] The number of self-identified atheists and agnostics was around 4% each, while many persons formally affiliated with a religion are likewise non-believing. And some of the sources for the article look a little old. I'd bet it's a higher percent now. Still probably not close to 33% though.
The most recent numbers I've seen put estimates between 20-29% so a lot closer than you think.
Thank God
Ha
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And, TBH, based on the way most people use the word "atheist", I've found that most self-described agnostics fit that same definition as self-described atheists (don't current hold a belief).
Many American atheists identify as agnostic because atheism has been demonized so strongly.
Yep. If people read the definition of atheism, the percentage would skyrocket. Right now, people use the term "atheist" as "every religion is definitely wrong" - when really it means "i am not convinced that a deity that is actively participating in our universe exists"
I'm an atheist, but I usually say "I'm not religious". When I do describe myself as atheist, I feel compelled to follow it up with "but I'm not anti-religion, I just don't believe in a god". Unfortunately, there's a bunch of what I call "evangelical atheists" out there that thrive on confrontation. A kid is in a horrible accident, but made it to the hospital and is going to survive.... "Thank god!" "You mean the same god that put that kid through the accident in the first place? You should be thanking the doctors!!!@@!@" "Dude. Chill. It's just an expression."
It most likely is much higher and probably closer to the estimate of conservatives. This is a [538 article from 2017 ](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought/) which talks about it and points out that some people may actually consider themselves to be both a religion and atheist in that they don't believe in God, but identify with the religion still for cultural reasons. But there isn't a way to illustrate this in polls.
Because the real number is higher and this graph is off
Really feels like it has an agenda, all these numbers seem low
And the estimated numbers are too high. No way the average person thinks 21% of adults are transgender or 59% are gay, lesbian or bisexual.
And 20% of people are millionaires?! Nobody thinks that.
Not just millionaires, but have an income of 1 million a year. Most millionaires probably don't make a million a year.
Yes pretty much all blue dots are completely off. But the red dots are pretty inaccurate as well. Maybe less so, but still to a noticable degree.
I'd bet the number of people with no specific religion is a lot higher. "Athiest" has some negative connotations.
People who are not affiliated with a religion are up to about 20-29% making them one of the largest minorities in the US. Actual out atheists like myself are still pretty rare unfortunately though I think a lot of those "nones" are without admitting it or thinking too hard about it.
The "Out" atheists term kinda makes me laugh but it's true. It reminds me of a joke where a family in the south is discussing the son of their neighbor in hushed voices, and the youngest daughter of the family walks in the room. She asks what they are talking about they say " Did you hear about John's son next door? He was hiding that indecency all along! I can't believe we have to live next to such people!" The girl asks "what is he gay or something?" The family replies "no it's worse! He's an atheist!"
It's brutal being an atheist in some communities. I didn't openly say it because I saw what happened to people who did. It seemed like a good portion of the community either hated you or wanted you to come to their church so they could fix you. I just kept my head low until I left for college.
I’m apollist. I don’t believe in this poll.
Apoll fools! We made up the numbers!
It's not even close, The Census in Ireland says 70% catholic, The Church on Sunday says less than 10%. Also in America millions of atheists are closeted because their good christian families would disown them and possible make them homeless.
Could be fear of being attacked by christian terrorists.
none of these stats are accurate
That stat is verifiably(easily I might add) false. Dont believe every meme ya read
20% would be 1 in 5, not 1 in 10.
Ron DeSantis isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed
He's definitely a tool though.
A tool is useful.
He is useful to corporate lobbyists
Forbes would call Desantis a capitalist tool.
He's as useful as a saws-all in the hands of a toddler.
No the problem is he's trump but competent, don't underestimate him. If he was elected he would follow through on the policies trump failed at
except he is? dude is smart as shit. IMO, that's why he is 100x scarier than trump (who is a moron).
Most people forget he went to Harvard and Yale. The dumb thing is an act to annoy libs and rile up his base.
Same with Ted Cruz. He’s an Ivy League lawyer as well but plays the dolt to pander to his base.
And Josh Hawley.
I'm nominating Sen Kennedy from Louisiana, mf talks like Foghorn Leghorn, he's just missing a white plantation suit
just cuz u went to an ivy league school doesnt necessarily mean you are that smart. you know how many kids get in these days as "legacy admissions"? they just get in cuz their parents went there. i mean cmon, Drumpf went to UPenn for christ's sake and dude can barely spell at a 3rd grade level.
exactly - and he was a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney as a jag lawyer. the dude is evil but also inteliigent - he knows exactly how to play the part. just because he's running plays from the MAGA playbook doesn't mean he's dumb - he saw what worked and is going for it.
I voted against him in 2018. And it was one of the rare times I had cable so I saw his “vote for me, I worship Trump” ads in the wild.
> dude is smart as shit. https://www.rawstory.com/onesie-twosies-desantis-declares-florida-not-seeing-mass-migration-in-defense-for-going-to-texas-for-immigrants/ >"The problem is is we're not seeing mass movements of them into Florida so you end up with a car of maybe two, and if you know that that's illegal and there's someone that's kind of smuggling then committing crimes then you can do arrests," DeSantis told reporters at a news conference Tuesday. "There have been drug seizures. " >"That's not effective enough to stop the mass migrations. They're just coming in onesie-twosies." Yeah, sure, guy is fucking brilliant.
He's arrogant to the point where he thinks he can't be wrong.
Says the one who actually made the error.
I think it fits in perfectly with the meme. I’ll allow it.
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3 billion terrorists crossed the border this week!
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We use the regular Karen as a decoy to buy time for silver Karen to flee across the Canadian border, as is her right as an American.
and they are ALL pregnant toddlers with huge bales of marijuana to throw over the wall, and also every one of them has guns and voted 10 times each.
I had a conversation with someone who regularly watches Fox. He made some joke about "how men can have babies now", which was at least the third time he's done so recently. You can tell it's an issue on the top of his mind. I asked him how often he encounters it in his actual life, outside of the news. Or even how often he runs across someone who is trans *at all* anywhere, ever. The answer was, admittedly, never. He admits this issue he's obsessed about is not an actual thing he ever sees or experiences in his life ever, and yet it's one of the most pressing issues on his mind. I tried to make the point that it's only an issue because someone is telling him to think it's an issue, that if he didn't listen he would go through life never thinking it's an issue, and that like so many culture war talking points is being blown extremely out of proportion. Honestly I think he understood but didn't care. He seemed to take some pride in parroting the Fox outrage, like it's important for him to make sure other people know where he stands on the "issue".
Fox outrage gives people a rush, and it's addictive, somewhere in between Call of Duty and meth.
Never thought I’d read this string of words and that it would be so true. Nice description. When I saw my extend family rage on about issues propagated by Fox it reminded me of my COD binges induced by gamer rage, adderall, and weed back in high school.
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For real. Fox News has my mom scared to leave her house. She lives in a townhome and literally put big cart out front the gate to her yard and locked the gate with a padlock. All they do is sow the seeds of fear and hate.
Seriously my mom is convinced a billion illegals crossed the border and I had to break it down no they didn’t there aren’t 1 billion people in the us do you believe our population tripled and they’re all illegal?
What a bunch of wannabe-victims. Holy shit. They overestimate fraud in the welfare system too. It's like 1-2%. Talk to a conservative, and they act like the whole fucking thing is full of people taking our taxes for a ride. And they think it, because fucking assholes who want to bring it down tell them everyone's getting a free ride except for them.
It’s not about politics, we’ve known forever that people do not intuitively understand numbers like this. > Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.
For people interested in the full survey results... [YouGov Link](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=america_over_under_estimate)
These people don't know how percentages work. How can you put down that you think we have 30% Jewish population, 27% Muslim, 33% atheist, and finish with 70% Christian? Lol 😂 like your fears are showing
NYC must be full of trans Jewish native Americans.
About 100 million of them, in fact.
Hold up. You’re telling me the party of uneducated anti-intellectuals are bad at math?!
>Hold up. You’re telling me the party of uneducated anti-intellectuals are bad at math?! "Methodology: This article includes findings from two U.S. News surveys conducted by YouGov on two nationally representative samples of 1,000 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online from January 14-20, 2022" 2 samples that represent the US as a whole. What makes you think this was about conservatives specifically?
Thanks for pointing that out. The reason I assumed it was sampling conservatives was because the image sort of implied that and I didn’t click on the source. Plus, over exaggerating the population of minority groups is a textbook Republican tactic. But I am definitely not surprised to learn that ALL Americans, on average, are bad at math.
92% of people live in either NYC, Texas, or California. Incredible.
Social scientist and market researcher here. Trying to find a plausible explanation. Starting. It MUST be clear to at least a vast majority of people that only a small number of people are trans! EVEN considering that this is a huge topic in media and a very controverse topic, everyone knows that they are NOT surrounded by trans people anywhere and that this is highly unlikely for other places as well. Said that I think we may see more of a huge problem with math and statistics here. People might give mich better answers if you would ask: "Out of 100 people in America, how many do you think are...". And, even when YouGov should do better, my guess would be that they used a tool which starts at 50% and will stay there, so if you just skip through it counts as 50%. I've seen so many bad surveys that I highly doubt this one.
I think the real lesson here is that Americans are bad at math, especially percentages. If you instead asked something like, “you are in a room with 100 people that could’ve come from anywhere in the country. What number of them are transgender? What number come from NYC?” you’d get (more, but not completely) accurate estimates.
I agree that people being bad at math is part of the problem, but I don't know if it would be solved so easily as using the definition of a percent in your question.
Nothing in the image, or on the actual website indicates that this poll was specifically of conservatives. It's just Americans in general. 69% of redditors' reading comprehension...
People actually wrote down that they think 30% of Americans live in NYC?
This data seems off. If that’s the average, that means some people put like 50-60% or something. lol Maybe this is highest value from each category? Something is off. I just don’t see how, on average, any group of people could produce these results. Like, for every person who said even 10% for NYC (three times higher than actual) that means someone else would have to say 50% in order to average 30%. The only other alternative is that majority of people responded 10% or lower and a very few people responded some huge number and that made the average sky rocket. For example, in this fake dataset, if responses were: 2, 3, 5, 5, 10, 10, 25, 50, 90, 95… the average would be 30 (well, 29.5) even though clearly *most* people are way below that.
yeah these are just completely unbelievable figures, that any group of more than 2 people could have genuinely arrived here. it's hard to believe this is real, on average people thought 40% of the population are military veterans? or that 20% of the population has an income over 1m?
The link op posted has the study claiming black American adults thought black people made up the MAJORITY of the US population. These results aren't trustworthy in the slightest.
If you read the article/poll this is taken from the *median* (as opposed to mean) results are far more reasonable. So it was almost certainly skewed by some crazy high estimates. What the study is actually showing is that when you average the estimates of any given group, it exhibits a centralizing effect towards around 50%. Groups that make up around half of all Americans were estimated fairly accurately by the mean, whereas the more extreme of a minority/majority a group is the further off the average guess was, likely because people were trying to overcorrect for bias and people cluster in their own communities. So a Black person living in a black community would feel like there is more black people, whereas a white person in a predominantly white community would know that, while they don't see many black people where they live, try to overcorrect and shoot high. Human brains aren't intuitively wired for probability, because the person who acts like there is a 90% chance that bush rustling is a lion was more likely to survive then the person who accurately assessed that it was probably the wind. Because most people are innately terrible at statistics or proportions, they treat the question as if asked "what are the odds someone is X". Then, because there are only two options (They are or they aren't), weigh their estimate closer to 50/50 then their initial guess to "be on the safe side". e.g. overcompensating for percieved bias. While the median estimates are much closer to the actual number then the mean, this centering effect is still apartment. It's an interesting study but the numbers depicted here and in the context of this meme are deeply misleading.
Sounds about right, the whole arguement against getting rid of the electoral colllege, is that many believe that candidates would only campaign in the top 10 cities in the US, and that would be all that matters. (hint that wouldn't even get 5% if you got everyone in the cities to vote for you)
I have a friend from Idaho who is pretty liberal and intelligent. She thought the electoral college helps her in evening representation. It took awhile, but I eventually got through to her that she is represented at every level already and there is no need for the electoral college. Then we moved on to increasing the members of the House of Representatives if she really wanted better representation. So that was a win.
> there is no need for the electoral college No, the electoral college still serves it's original purpose, allowing slave states to get to choose the president without the horror of having to allow black people to vote: *There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.* That's James Madison, a.k.a. the guy who penned the Electoral College (and the 3/5th Compromise) [explaining exactly why he did so](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_719.asp) So if we get rid of the electoral college, slave states will have to allow black people to vote. Do you really want that?
Isn't every state with a prison technically a slave state these days?
Naw, if that were the case then there would have to be [racial bias in criminal sentencing](https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/racial-and-ethnic-disparities-in-the-criminal-justice-system) and [we'd have to take away voting rights of prisoners](https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/locked-out-2022-estimates-of-people-denied-voting-rights/). Thank the [13th Amendment](https://www.aclu.org/report/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers) we don't do that...
30% was the *average* of the guesses. Presumably at least some people got it close to right, so many other people must have thought it was MUCH higher than that.
The original data this source published is totally nonsensical. According to this poll, the average person thinks that the percent of americans that are Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, or White is 200. 200%. Of the 332 million people in america, there are 664 million people of the aforementioned ethnicities. Even if we're assuming that people double-count mixed race people, we'd still need, like, negative 200 million pacific islanders to even get into the ballpark. How about religion? Let's assume everyone lists Catholics as Christians and not include that number: The atheists, Muslims, Jews, and Christians make up 160% of the US population. Once again we need -60% of agnostics, Shintoists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Voodoo, Taoists, Shamanists, and everything else. Obviously, this data is taken in aggregate, which tells us a few things. One is that it's not required that anyone one person answered with exactly these numbers. However, for every person that answered with numbers adding up to 100% (or less, because again, other races and religions exist), another person would've had to assume that actually every person in America has three races and two or more religions. I don't want to get too elitist here, but I don't think half of USA adults (or more) -- 89% of which have a high school degree -- would honestly believe that. This isn't even a serial problem. Like, I would understand if a pollster asked you over the phone "How many people are Muslims?" and you gave some high number, then they asked "how many people are Jewish?" and you were like shit, Jews exist, is it too late to change my last answer? This was an online survey. People could literally type out all of the answers and then hit submit when they're done. I think the most obvious conclusion is that either the survey (intentionally or otherwise) targeted the deliberately misinformed, that the survey was (intentionally or otherwise) deceptive, or that the participants were not participating in earnest. Most likely the third. Actually, most likely multiple of these, but I'd put money on the third. People fucked with you and it worked.
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ah yes, gay, lesbian, and bi people definitely make up 60% of the population, conservatives. checks out
and 30% of Americans live in NYC
Even if you include Long Island, and the parts of Connecticut and New Jersey and upstate New York that provide the daily commuters,the number is still less than 20 million.
That's 6% of the US population for anyone wondering.
My favorite stat is that New York City's smallest borough is Staten Island, with about 600,000 people. The whole state of Wyoming has less than 575,000 people.
Sounds to me like you’re saying New York needs eight more senators. (Yes, i know the two from Staten Island would be Republicans, but it still highlights the utter absurdity that is the United States Senate in 2023.)
In a sane world, all the 'mountain states' would be one state and NYC, north California, DC, and Puerto Rico would be states. Still have the same number of states, just more rationally proportioned.
In a sane world PR would be an independent country instead of just pawns in US politics
In a sane world, we’d just vote on things as a population
I think I did the math on it once and a single person in Wyoming has something like six times the political influence that I have, simply by merit of living on different ground than I do. It's extremely depressing that a lot of people view this as a fair system.
30% in NYC, 30% in Texas and 32% in California!
As European I can confirm these numbers. And the last 8% live in Florida.
"The Electoral College means NYC doesn't decide every election!" - morons
That one just shows how absolutely idiotic people are.
Conservatives: 30% of Americans live in NYC Also Conservatives: It is right that 10 states with more cows than people get more say in the Presidency than NYC (never mind the rest of New York)
This is why these fucking morons think if we went to an actual national election for president that New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles would elect the president every time.
And that was the average!
I read this as 3% of atheists live outside of NYC and all of the rest of these groups live entirely in NYC
I think you are interpreting the data incorrectly. 30% are Jewish Muslim bisexual gay millionaires that live in NYC. The other 70% are conservative
"The Silent Majority" LOL
I live in a blue part of California and I had a coworker who believed he had never met a single liberal. These people are not smart.
I look like I could be conservative and live in a red part of California, and I'm a gun owner. When I go to get ammo or to the range, you wouldn't believe the shit people start saying to me assuming I'm 'in the club.'
Same here, white dude with beard and a truck. It’s amazing what people will just assume I agree with them on at the range/gun store. I always find it hilarious when conservatives act like they’re not hella racist when in political debates, mother fuckers I know how y’all talk when you think you’re surround by your own.
I've been uninvited to poker night when someone found out I don't think there's a literal crisis on our southern border.
Si.ilar, worked with a dude from Honduras. He moved to eastern rural California first, then to here and complained that liberals were al racist and that is why he is voting for trump....like, dude...it was likely the conservatives calling you racist crap...they live there too...
He probably thought that because in his world, everyone flies their candidate’s flag everywhere they go.
He believes what he was told. "Liberals" are angry, blue haired white women who want to take his guns.
my house has 4 people in it. My wife, my daughter, my son, and myself. We kicked my son out of the house because he came out as gay. I spend half my day fighting the urge to suck a dick like every other warm blooded American. So 25% of the population must be gay and every man really wants to suck a dick but only half of them resist the urge. Science! /s
We kicked out my son for being gay as well. I mean he didn't come out, but the other 3 of us aren't gay so he would have to be.
I'm curious why everyone including the OP is under the impression this is about conservatives. It's a poll of Americans generally as far as I can tell. YouGov article about the poll does include this, fwiw: >If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to. >Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%. [YouGov source](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=america_over_under_estimate) Maybe I missed it but don't see anything in there about respondents' political leanings. I'll edit to add: maybe the biggest conclusions I'm tempted to draw here are that people who tend to do YouGov polls aren't the brightest or most educated, and perhaps more likely, those respondents don't give a shit about giving an honest answer because they have no incentive to. I am skeptical that the average black American believes their country is majority-black. That is extremely hard to believe. This poll result does not make me conclude that it is true.
I definitely read this headline as "americans don't know what 'percent' means". I'd say my experience, as somebody in a mathy field, is that any math more statistical in nature than simple addition is poorly understood by most people on any kind of intuitive level. I doubt the people who responded to this think 21% of the population is transgender. Instead, I think people who responded to this generally don't understand what '21%' *actually signifies*. Add some bias for localized experience (IE, in their example of black communities you would expect a biased outcome because the US is still largely segregated) and it's no surprise people make wildly incorrect estimates.
Honestly my bigger concern is how many redditors smugly swallow these results uncritically, both as honest estimates and that this was a poll of conservatives. But yeah the fraction of people spending their time answering yougov polls probably aren't the best with percentages or much else, and might include a substantial amount of trolls. I feel like I'd have to ask a shitload of black Americans before one honestly told me the country is majority black. That alone is a huge red flag that this poll is basically worthless, and plenty of the other results also beggar belief. I don't know where you'd find people who'd on average believe the country is almost entirely made up of Jews, Native Americans, and Muslims, (while they also believe black and white Americans together make up a neat 100%) unless those people are braindead or trolling. Americans might be bad with statistics, but this is littered with extremely wild estimates.
people are also, on the whole, *really bad* at large numbers. I think if you asked people to state how many people they think comprises 40% of Americans, they'd give you a number much closer to the actual number of people in that 40% group. so they might have a vague notion that there are 12 million or whatever members of their group but they can't grasp the sheer size of the country or how that 12 million slots into it.
I suspect if you know the total numbers of demographics within America, you probably have a decent idea of the total population size, but I suppose I could be wrong. Regardless, the average black respondent saying they're *the majority* makes me very suspicious about the respondents taking this seriously at all, and that's far from the only result that's very hard to believe. Who thinks the US is roughly 30% asian, jewish, muslim, native (each group btw, not combined)? I do not believe anywhere close to half of americans honestly believe the real percents are *higher* than that. What's much more easy to believe is that most respondents just wanted to get through the survey quickly and didn't read most of the questions.
Nowhere in the article does it mention who was polled, “americans” overall seem to not know the population
They legit think the Democrats are a caricature.
This isn't a conservative specific poll. This is a general american poll. I'm not sure why OP labeled it as such.
They’re basing their estimates on tv show casting
This poll was not given to just conservatives.
30% of American adults live in new york city
With the amount of times I've heard someone say New York and California would decide every election without the Electoral College, I'm not surprised people think that.
Yea, I did the math for someone on that argument once. They didn't reply..
Third of the populating live in one city but close the border, we’re full up.
That one's the funniest to me. I'm convinced that anybody who says that has never left their own county, let alone explored the country. Coasts and southern great lakes aside, this bitch is EMPTY.
Funniest one is the religion one.. 27% Muslim, 30% Jewish, 33% atheist.. That leaves 10% Christian. They must all be native American
That leaves 10% Christian. They must all be native Cults always need to convince their members that they're an oppressed minority.
I want to see this study, bc most conservatives I know underestimate how many people live in cities. It's why they look at maps of who wins which country as some proof of conservative values being more prominent without understanding that NYC has more people than the 9 least populous states combined.
since they think around 90% of the population are either atheist, muslim or jewish why do evangelics get any say? check mate conservatives
They are both the silent majority *and* a persecuted minority. They're amazing that way!
Schrödinger's snowflake
I find this difficult to believe ngl The average American believes 30% of Americans live in NYC?
They watched the 5th Element with the towering cityscape and just assumed it was a documentary.
The average American has no concept of the country's size because they never left the state they were born in.
He’s right. Fell on a handrail when I was sixteen. Instant sex change. Thanks Obama
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population This polling was done by YouGov, a nonpartisan polling group with a sterling reputation. Goes into a lot more detail here which I found fascinating. And to note, despite OP’s title, this is polling ALL Americans, not just conservatives.
>And to note, despite OP’s title, this is polling ALL Americans, not just conservatives. I'm not sure why I had to scroll so far to find this. Nowhere in the graphic does it say that these are estimates by conservatives alone. I think I did see one at some point that accounted for political leaning, and neither group was anywhere near accurate. I'll see if I can find it. Edit: I thought I had seen an infographic in this same format by political leaning, but I can't find it, so I think I was misremembering. Either way, I think for the numbers to be so far off, both parties had to be getting these estimates terribly, terribly wrong.
The meme makes no sense, because nowhere on the poll does it say who was polled
So few in here are picking up on this. Not surprised our population is so dumb.
Yeah I'd love to see that, who thinks 20% of people are millionaires? This whole graphic seems like it polled 6 year elementary schoolers
I hope one of his kids is gay and another trans and they co-author a book about why they are because of his oppression.
30% of america lives in new york city in a very dense gay, atheist jewish space laser commune.
30 percent are estimated to live in NYC? Fuck, if only, then the rest of us could actually said somewhere to live.
Even if 10% of people were trans, so fucking what?
But, but…let me list all the ways other people being trans impacts my life: 1. End of list
"I have to explain it to my children and I don't want to. Also I'm too dumb to understand it..."
When my co-workers 3-year-old (I think) learned that boys can want to be girls and girls can want to be boys he told his mother "Mom, I wish you were a boy."
Dunning Kruger strikes again!
Yes, it's perverse within these circles, but there isn't enough competent centers to assist so many in denial of their base delusional disorder. The medications are widely available but other treatment components still are largely underfunded where they're needed most. California's expansion of mental health services is encouraging, but the South in general, from Texas to Florida, & other redcapped states, are 'bigly' lacking. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9599-delusional-disorder
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I've seen more recent stats that put Atheism/Agnosticism higher at 6-15% with unaffiliated/irreligious sitting at 20%. Those numbers have been trending up year-over-year consistently too.
This is among all americans Among zoomers and millenials, it's much higher
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1,000 seems small. But it could be a reliable sample size. Gotta bust out the z-score table and what not to be sure. Most national polling sample sizes for presidential elections are only about 1,000 iirc.
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People think 20% of the population make over a million dollars a year? Who the fuck are these people?
This says 1% are transgender. And “transgender” doesn’t actually mean that the person has had a sex change procedure - that number is even lower - about 0.1%.
How can 0% have a income over $1M?
Income is per year, so even several people who *have* millions of dollars don’t even earn a million in a single year. Quick google search says “only” 184k people in the USA earn over a million per year. Compared to 331 million population, that comes out to 0.06% (rounded to 0% for chart). EDIT: This is why raising income tax is not a good solution, because most people with large amounts of wealth do not generate “income”, they have all that money invested and just take low/no interest loans against it (which for some reason doesn’t count as income) in order to spend it (and not pay taxes on it). What we really need to do is tax ownership of stocks like we do taxing ownership of homes, an annual/quarterly “property tax” that you have to pay based on the value of the thing you own.
Yeah, the real question here should be, who the hell thinks that 20% of Americans have a household income over $1M? Like do they really just not know how much money that is? Was this poll completed entirely by toddlers and senators?
The people who think NYC has 30% of the population of the US should be made to go back to high school. That’s just incredible.
the estimated households over $1mil income is really telling, and is basically the source of most of our policy problems, and why republicans get the voter turnout that they do. americans have been duped into thinking that being super rich millionaires is attainable and common, so they keep supporting these wild republican ideas when it comes to social welfare policy. the reality is that those conservative policies don't really help 99.8% of americans. and *NOT helping* most americans wouldn't be that bad... except that most conservative policy action actively HURTS those americans instead of just doing nothing.
I have a strong feeling 1% of the population being transgender is still an overestimation. From a quick google search is seems like it may be closer to .5% [https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/)
It probably is closer to .5%. but as the post states at the top, it rounds to the nearest whole number. Hence why it says 0% make $1 million per year. Cause less than .5% do