Quirks of cognition explain why we dramatically overestimate the size of minority groups.

Abstract

Americans dramatically overestimate the size of African American, Latino, Muslim, Asian, Jewish, immigrant, and LGBTQ populations, leading to concerns about downstream racial attitudes and policy preferences. Such errors are common whenever the public is asked to estimate proportions relevant to political issues, from refugee crises and polarization to climate change and COVID-19. Researchers across the social sciences interpret these errors as evidence of widespread misinformation that is topic-specific and potentially harmful. Here, we show that researchers and journalists have misinterpreted the origins and meaning of these misestimates by overlooking systematic distortions introduced by the domain-general psychological processes involved in estimating proportions under uncertainty. In general, people systematically rescale estimates of proportions toward more central prior expectations, resulting in the consistent overestimation of smaller groups and underestimation of larger groups. We formalize this process and show that it explains much of the systematic error in estimates of demographic groups ([Formula: see text] estimates from 22 countries). This domain-general account far outperforms longstanding group-specific explanations (e.g., biases toward specific groups). We find, moreover, that people make the same errors when estimating the size of racial, nonracial, and entirely nonpolitical groups, such as the proportion of Americans who have a valid passport or own a washing machine. Our results call for researchers, journalists, and pundits alike to reconsider how to interpret misperceptions about the demographic structure of society.