The eCrozier

There’s a sucker born every minute – P. T. Barnum (actually a misattribution)

Ipsos, a non-partisan market research company, recently completed a comprehensive survey entitled: “The Perils of Perception.” The results of the survey show how we’re remarkably ill-informed about the society in which we live. For example, the survey showed that we think that only 56% of our country self-identifies as Christian. The reality is 78% of us do. Americans believe that 15% of our country is Muslim. When the reality is that only 1% are Muslim. 51% of us believe the murder rate is rising, while only 30% believe it’s falling. The truth is that it has been falling steadily for over 20 years. The same is true with teen pregnancy. We believe that 24% of all teenage girls become pregnant. The actual figure is 3% and that too has been declining steadily for decades as has the number of abortions performed each year. We also believe that 32% of our population are immigrants. The fact is only 13% of our population are immigrants.

These misperceptions have a real impact on public policy. We vote based on these wildly inaccurate perceptions electing people who reflect back to us our misperceptions. Take our public policy on criminal justice: We demand building more prisons to incarcerate more people, because we believe violent crime is growing and we need to lock more people up. The truth is violent crime, like the above mentioned murder rate, has declined steadily over the last 20 years. But our prison population continues to grow. In the last 30 years, the number of people we incarcerate quadrupled from 500,000 to 2.3 million. We have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. And we spend over $70 billion annually incarcerating people, some of that going to for-profit entities who benefit from this misperception. Now, it would make sense to be doing this if violent crime were on the rise, but it’s declined by 24% in the last 12 years.

In the 19th Century, P. T. Barnum is wrongly alleged to have said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” It seems we’re no wiser now at differentiating fact from fiction. We’re suckers for misperception. If the moral psychologists are right, then we’re such suckers because the misperception is what we want to believe. We somehow want to believe we’re being over-run by immigrants and Muslims, plagued by rampant teen pregnancy, and seriously escalating violent crime. Sounds pretty dystopian to me. But none of it’s true. Yet, we believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts.

A book was recently published entitled: “The Lost Gospel – Decoding the Sacred Text that reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary Magdalene.” But, the “Sacred Text” in question isn’t “Lost” and it’s not even a “Gospel.” And to top that, there’s no mention of Jesus or Mary Magdalene in the ancient manuscript in question. Dr. Robert Cargill, a scholar of Syriac language and history, calls the book “speculation wrapped in hearsay couched in conspiracy masquerading as science ensconced in sensationalism slathered with misinformation.” I predict the book will become a best seller. People will want to believe it to be true. Barnum might’ve commented about all this by saying: “I told you so,” but, of course, to my knowledge he never actually said that either.

+Scott