Just post something ๐
People think that 1/5 americans are trans? Billionaire owned media really does shit in our brains, huh?
That struck me too. 1 in 5 are trans? Who are these people they polled?
And these are the averages. Which means for every answer that accurately said 1%, someone said 39% (or two people said 30%)
Which means they think if they know two other people, one of them must be trans. Or more likely, that entire cities of "others" (that they've never been to) must be trans.
It doesn't surprise me. With how much focus there is on issues like trans athletes in the media and politics, people incorrectly assume the actual number of people "at issue" is in proportion. This is how we get state legislatures spending huge amounts of time creating legislation that will impact like three people.
But like, do they not notice that every fifth person they meet isn't trans?
Maybe they think all the trans people are in some other part of the country like New York or California, or maybe they think that trans people are so indistinguishable from cis people that anyone they meet could be secretly trans?
That could explain the paranoia that some people have about trans people. And also why people e.g. think that Daniel Radcliffe's wife is trans because she's taller than him (even though they have a child together, but then again, maybe these people think that transwomen can get pregnant.).
Definitely depends on the spaces they exist in, too. I only recently learned I was wrong about how many black people there are in the US. Turns out they're just "overrepresented" in the media I consume and I've lived most of my life in very diverse neighborhoods. Similarly, trans topics overrepresent the amount of trans people in a lot of online spaces and people tend to extrapolate when they only have all the data. I can see why a terminally-online individual would feel like there's a trans epidemic.
I mean, the way the internet talks I thought I was the only straight person left.
Wait, atheism is that low in the US?? 38.9% of Australians indicated no religion at the last census, I knew we had more but never expected a whole order of magnitude difference!
That number is wrong.
28% of people in the US don't have a religion. People here just don't like the word atheist.
Atheism still has a stigma associated with it here. Not sure now, but there were surveys less than 10 years ago saying that Americans were less likely to vote for an atheist than for a convicted felon (and this was before Trump!). Other polls often use the term "Nones" to refer to people who don't affiliate with a major religion, but that tends to include atheists, agnostics, areligious people, and some others thrown in there.
There's a good explainer here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
That poll has 17% of Nones as atheist, which would be about 5% of the population, just above the 3% in the chart from OP. Although I bet part of the "agnostics" are agnostic atheists, but don't use the term. That being said, Pew also has this page: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/age-race-education-and-other-demographic-traits-of-us-religious-groups/#age 
That shows that people under 50 are way different. 73% atheist of 69% None is about 50%, which means that a full half of Americans under 50 identify as atheist. So, a BIG generational gap.
I mean yeah, I don't identify with the term atheist because it ended up shifting meaning to anti-theist on the internet in my opinion. I guess I just conflated it with "no religion" in my head, which is what the Australian statistic is.
Yes, this chart is bogus. In the last 5 years Gallup estimates of the LGBT population have gone from 5% to 7.6%, not 3%. And there's no way people who understand how to eat soup or wear pants would think 30% of Americans live in New York City.
This list is Wild. Like two thirds live in Calif & Texas loool
Also 41% are black.
90% live in CA, TX, and NYC! Sounds right to me I can't think of a single other large metro area or anything like that.
Ah, New York City, population 120 million.
No, that thing is just wrong. They "interviewed" two groups of 1000 people online who had opted into their "panel". Either they're lying about bias, or they were scammed.
The easiest giveaway is the "40% of adults are veterans" number. The average American is well aware that almost half their aquientances are not veterans.
33% Atheist
27% Muslim
30% Jewish
58% Christian (41% being Catholic, so that's about 70% of all Christians)
This just proves that Americans do indeed have more people per capita.
Given that the "estimated proportion" range is only between 20-76%, regardless of the question, this seems more indicative of a poor understanding of statistics than an over/under estimation of specific demographics, especially since a lot of contradictory demographics are way overestimated.
For example, I am significantly more likely to believe that Americans suck at percentages than that they believe nearly ever single person in the country is either Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic (these three "estimated proportions" add up to 98%).
Side note: interestingly all religious categories listed add up to 189%, but there is some overlap depending on definition (e.g. some people might argue that "Catholics are Christians" or "Jewish is an ethnicity so you can be Jewish and atheist"). Thus I picked the three that most people would agree are extremely unlikely to overlap, which coincidentally added up to nearly 100%.
EDIT: I would like to see this survey redone with the same questions, but with the addition of a few questions for things that are widely known to be extremely uncommon, bordering on non-existent, such as "percentage of people with only one ear" or "percentage of people with more than 12 siblings," and some questions for things that are widely known to be extremely common, bordering on universal, such as "percentage of people that have electricity at home" or "percentage of adults who own a phone." If even these questions result in answers grossly over/underestimating the percentage, what we have is actually an aversion to providing very small or very large estimates. (It is already known that people easily overestimate the frequency of things that are unusual especially if they can easily think of an example, such as overestimating the number of redheads because you had a classmate with red hair, or even because you can think of a celebrity with red hair).
I found it unbelievable as well so I tested these questions on college and graduate students. Answers were in range. CS majors literally believed that 40% of Americans are black and a third of the population lives in Texas.
What a person needs to answer correctly is sociocultural awareness.
I think this still shows a poor grasp of percentages/statistics. If you were to follow up the Texas question by asking in turn, "what percentage live in California?" " How about New York?" "And Florida?" "So then what percentage live in the 46 remaining states plus US territories?" you'd watch a classroom of students slowly realize they've way surpassed 100% thanks to their overinflated initial estimates. Or conversely, if you gave them a paper with a list of states and asked them to write down what percentage of Americans lived in each state next to the state's name, it might not be accurate, but it would probably add up to 100% for significantly more respondents.
The over/under estimation problem is almost certainly worsened when you ask about a single demographic in isolation, rather than all possible demographics at once.
What? Of course Catholics are Christians. It's literally a denomination of Christianity, a proper subset.
Wow you guys need better media and media literacy, these are wild levels of disinformation
Nearly half the population apparently having been in the military, 1 in 5 trans, 1 in 3 gay or lesbian. Do these people imagine entire battalions of non cishet people?
It says 3% of Americans are atheists, but about 29% of Americans are "religiously unaffiliated". I would say the poll only overestimated by 4%.
People can be agnostic too, I think religiously unaffiliated doesn't mean they are atheist but the reverse is true.
I'm not buying that atheist one.
I bet if we're going by self-report, a lot of people who "aren't religious" still shy away from the atheism label.
This is quite a fascinating insight into many things.
One of which is how far apart the estimations are from reality.
Fear plays a huge part in most of these estimations. E.g. the world's leading organized religion is Christianity. And yet, when asked how many people in the US were Muslim, the average estimation in the US was 26%. But the reality is (according to this,) around 1%.
Another example being the percentage of Hispanics living in the US. Reality is closer to 17%, but many believed that there were over 2 times that.
My takeaway is that people are pretty good at estimating how many people have children and voted in 2020.
85% own a smartphone, 88% own a car, but only 83% have a driver's license, that would explain a few things. Is gas cheaper than mobile internet in the US?
Also, Americans means US citizens, Mexico and Canada are conveniently excluded as usual.
All the numbers on this chart make no goddamn sense. Even the most right wing of fox news watching nutjobs wouldn't say there are %20+ trans people in the USA. They always claim it's like 3 people and that's why they need to ignore them/they don't matter.
I need to see the region they polled in. Preferably the exact counties because these numbers don't make sense for either of the extreme sides answers, but also the moderates wouldn't answer some of these questions these ways either.
Who TF did they get answers from??
0% of households have an income over 1milion??? I mean I get its low but I believe it exists.
There are 128.45 million households in the US. This graph explicitly round to the nearest whole percent. To have a percentage of 0, there could still be 642,141 households.
Edit: Actually I misread the stat. Of our 341.9 million people, 1.7 million might belong to a household making above a million dollars to still be approx 0%.
Rounding, right? 0.499999 rounds to zero.
I refuse to believe this
How tf car-brained USAinians in a car-dependant society assume only half the population owns a car?
Or that a fifth/a quarter of the country is Muslim/transgender/living on a million per year?
Or that NY is a third of the USA?
Is this data just bs?
True proportion: Democrats: 42% Republicans: 47%
Did I read this wrong? Iโm almost certain there are more registered Democrats than Republicans.
The income estimates are interesting.
We're apparently quite bad at estimating all income levels except who earns $100,000-$500,000 / year.
I'm here stuck on 65% of Americans own a house. In this economy??
I read something the other day about how there has been a slowdown, but not as much as we think. People are just taking on larger debt and paying a larger cut of their monthly income to buy homes.
The one that really got me was 12% black. I would have said 20% or so. The sexual, religion and race questions are wild! 30% Jewish?! Guess they're all in NYC. ๐