The Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog features an interesting graph comparing the actual and perceived percentange of foreign-born residents in 20 European countries. Consistent with my research on anti-foreign bias, people overestimate the percentage of foreigners in every single one of these countries.
Can you guess what two countries seem to have the greatest overestimate? France doesn’t surprise me, but Portugal?
Jul 6 2005
While the consistently pessimistic and erroneous Louis Uchitelle is reassuring elitists that America's middle class is insecure and in need of help, economist Steve Rose is crunching some numbers. The approach used here tracks family incomes over 15 years for people in their prime-earning years... These numbers pro...
Jul 5 2005
When professors complain about grade inflation, they rarely mention that their students are the easiest graders of all. The main way that colleges evaluate professors' teaching is with student evaluations. Students typically rate how good their professor was on a 1-5 scale. In practice, most students give most profe...
Jul 5 2005
The Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog features an interesting graph comparing the actual and perceived percentange of foreign-born residents in 20 European countries. Consistent with my research on anti-foreign bias, people overestimate the percentage of foreigners in every single one of ...
READER COMMENTS
Maestro
Jul 5 2005 at 2:24pm
How does this show bias of an anti-sort? Anecdotally, most people I’ve ever talked about it with (including black people) overestimate the percentage of Americans who are black. Are black people anti-black? I think it has more to do with poor understanding of statistics and what we are more likely to notice than anything else.
Maestro
Jul 5 2005 at 3:10pm
Also, what happens when you switch the question around? What percentage of the population do people think is native-born? I bet we tend to overestimate that number too.
Sean
Jul 5 2005 at 7:40pm
Portugal explanation: Brazilian and African (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde) Portuguese-speaking immigrants.
John Thacker
Jul 6 2005 at 3:32pm
Maestro,
However, if you read the linked page, you’ll see that overestimation by a person is correlated with greater opposition. So there is something there.
William Sjostrom
Jul 8 2005 at 6:44pm
I am curious where the numbers for “actual” percentage come from. Specifically, I wonder how illegal immigrants are counted. If the “actual” really means “legal”, then the perception might be the more accurate number, and the anti-foreign bias might be an anti-illegal immigrant bias.
Comments are closed.