British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows

[Ardemax]

A new survey for the Royal Statistical Society and King's College London shows public opinion is repeatedly off the mark on issues including crime, benefit fraud and immigration.

The research, carried out by Ipsos Mori from a phone survey of 1,015 people aged 16 to 75, lists ten misconceptions held by the British public. Among the biggest misconceptions are:
- Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34.

- Immigration: some 31 per cent of the population is thought to consist of recent immigrants, when the figure is actually 13 per cent. Even including illegal immigrants, the figure is only about 15 per cent. On the issue of ethnicity, black and Asian people are thought to make up 30 per cent of the population, when the figure is closer to 11 per cent.

- Crime: some 58 per cent of people do not believe crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19 per cent lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53 per cent lower than in 1995. Some 51 per cent think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012.

- Teen pregnancy is thought to be 25 times higher than the official estimates: 15 per cent of of girls under 16 are thought to become pregnant every year, when official figures say the amount is closer to 0.6 per cent.
Among the other surprising figures are that 26 per cent of people think foreign aid is in the top three items the Government spends money on (it actually makes up just 1.1 per cent of expenditure), and that 29 per cent of people think more is spent on Jobseekers' Allowance than pensions.

In fact we spend 15 times more on pensions - £4.9 billion on JSA vs £74.2 billion on pensions.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...s-8697821.html

Thoughts?

[Cerys]

To be honest, unless you're interested in it, you're not going to know this.. I don't sit here googling how much of our population is immigrants etc.

Does it really matter?

[FlyingJesus]

It does matter because so many people put forth misconceptions as though they were fact and that leads to miseducation of anyone impressionable enough to listen to their ranting. It also leads to people forming "opinions" that are provably wrong

[AgnesIO]

To be honest, unless you're interested in it, you're not going to know this.. I don't sit here googling how much of our population is immigrants etc.

Does it really matter?

Of course it matters. These kinds of misconceptions lead people to scream about how immigrants are taking over the country blah blah blah - yet these figures suggest whilst the situation is evidently not perfect, it certainly isn't as bad as people think.

I believe this is partly due to the screams of tabloids such as the Daily Star and The Sun - which both have gigantic leadership and are well known for their ludicrous stories which suggest the UK is about to be taken over by Al Qaeda bur'qa clad terrorists at any moment

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[Empired]

I believe this is partly due to the screams of tabloids such as the Daily Star and The Sun - which both have gigantic leadership and are well known for their ludicrous stories which suggest the UK is about to be taken over by Al Qaeda bur'qa clad terrorists at any moment

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I agree with this completely. It's shocking to see so many graphs (line graphs in particular) with the lines going up but they haven't labeled the axes. This usually means crime rates could be going up by 0.002% but the newspapers can make it look like it's going up by 50% simply by not labeling things.

[MKR&*42]

Only one that shocked me is teenage pregnancy, I genuinely thought it was at quite a shocking rate. I knew crime had decreased and all the others though etc. and I'm hardly surprised loads of people were wrong considering the crap that comes from the likes of the Daily Mail.

[Inseriousity.]

Stats aren't always valid of a person's experience. Someone living in a high crime area, for example, would think crime rate is higher when the national average is much lower because the national average also has to include the leafy suburbs and areas where crime is not as rampant. I do not think this makes someone wrong if their life experience does not match the average. However, as I've been involved in many conversations where the debate seems limited to "in the good ol' days", it's good to challenge that thinking and show their cynicism about the state of the country as a whole is not just limited to their own experiences.

[GommeInc]

Quite a lot of these misconceptions seem really obvious, particularly the pregnancy one. The ethnicity and immigration statistic is interesting - but again, not that alarming. There was no way it was over 30%, but it's interesting if it is around the teens mark.

[e5]

Not something we really know, it would just be wild guesses as we always hear about the stuff that happens to the minority so it makes it sound like it happens a lot

[Kardan]

Teenage pregnancy? 15% of 16 year olds have been pregnant?

...Really? What are they basing it on... are 'thought' to be pregnant each year...

That can't be true.