Mildly Interesting

Wouldn't have guessed you guys would have more vegans than union members

The math contributes some to this. Let's say the correct answer is 1%, and out of ten people, 9 of them guess 1% and the other guesses 51% - that one guess shifts the average from 1% to 6%. And if it's 1%, then there's no room for people to underestimate and bring the number back down, and the same is true of numbers close to 100%. The numbers closer to the middle don't necessarily mean that people were more correct on an individual level, but that some people overestimated and others underestimated and it came out closer to the right number. The graph ought to give information about the spread of errors and not just the raw average.

Here's the methodology according to the YouGov website:

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. The first survey included questions on groups involving race, education, income, family, gender, and sexuality, while the second survey included questions on religion, politics, and other miscellaneous groups. The samples were weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the 2018 American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as 2016 and 2020 Presidential votes (or non-votes). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. citizens. Real proportions were taken from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, YouGov’s internal poll results, and the results of other well-established polling firms. Most estimates were collected within the past three years; the oldest is from 2009. Because the real estimates presented cover a range of time periods, they may differ from actual population sizes at the time our survey was conducted.

People just have no idea what numbers mean. And, look at how education works here, who could blame them?

• 64% white
• 39% hispanic
• 41% black
• 29% asian
• 30% jewish
• 27% native americans

All the 230% of US population.

So looking at that chart the average person thinks that (roughly), one in four people are native American, one in four people are Asian, two in five people are black as well as two in five people being Hispanic. Or to use the given percentages the average American thinks that 136% of Americans are non-white. I suppose that explains a lot of the "white genocide" hysteria.

Part of this is people obviously not thinking about one per hundred and just giving a random percentage like number. Everything is clustered around 25, and 50 percent. This isn't reasonably measuring much(if anything as I can assure you nobody believes 90 percent of people live in either Texas, California, or NYC). The headline should be "don't poll people by asking what they think about qualitatively and asking them to translate it into quantitative percentages because you'll receive nonsense." Trying to reach other conclusions from such absolute noise really is just making things up.

Only 85% of the population owns a smartphone, I thought for sure it would be higher than that