It’s fairly well established that when it comes to understanding the thoughts, values, and often even the characteristics of society we are well off. For instance, we usually think crime is much worse than it is, or that there are many more immigrants and Muslims than there actually are.

Research from the Yale School of Management reveals that we’re equally clueless about the values the rest of society holds. For instance, if we were to ponder how many people are concerned with climate change now versus 30 years ago, we might reasonably assume that the number must have risen, but in reality, it has barely budged.

Mistaken assumptions

Such misperceptions seem remarkably common, and the researchers believe they’re usually far from random. Instead, they’re usually biased in the sense that we assume that past opinions were far more conservative than they really were.

This may seem harmless, but the researchers suggest that when we believe support for a certain position is rising, they’re far more likely to support intervention by lawmakers, even if they don’t agree with the position themselves.

The researchers examined our perception across 51 social issues, including abortion, immigration, gender, and gun control. The data on each issue was gathered from a range of sources, including Gallup and the Pew Research Center. They then asked nearly 1,000 volunteers to guess how public opinion had changed on each issue from the earliest reference point in the data to the latest.

Badly wrong

Typically, the volunteers were extremely wide of the mark. Indeed, they overestimated the amount of social change that had occurred for 57% of the issues. For example, people thought that the proportion of people willing to vote for a female president had jumped from just 32% to 70%, when the real figures were 74% and 96% respectively.

The researchers believe that this bias was due to our misperception about the level of conservatism people exhibited in the past. This hypothesis was confirmed via another study in which participants were asked to rank how liberal or conservative the two positions on any issue were. Pretty much across the board, people believed that there had been a profound shift in a more liberal direction, with this especially so on issues deemed to be highly partisan.

To then understand how these misperceptions might influence policy the team ran another handful of experiments on immigration, the death penalty, and assault weapons. These revealed that when we think public support for a position is increasing, we’re much more likely to believe lawmakers are justified in pushing through legislation supporting that policy.

“They think policy change is more appropriate if support has been growing than if support has been shrinking, even if the level of support right now would be the same,” the researchers explain.

The results highlight how the mistaken assumptions we have are likely to have a significant real-world impact. If we assume social change is already moving in the direction they want, the authors write, “we might not do what is necessary to secure victory in the first place.”