The Perils of Perception 2024
Public misperceptions prove to be persistent, spanning most countries and covering a wide range of topics. We explore the context in 2024.
For the last decade Ipsos has been exploring the gap between people’s perception and reality on a range of issues including society’s demographic makeup, the prevalence of obesity, the leading causes of death, the cost of raising a family, the risk of terrorism, the impact of climate change and many more.
In our 2024 report, we dive into these misperceptions and ask why people around the world are so often wrong – and what all this means for brands and businesses.
Key takeaways
- People tend to overestimate the scale of issues they worry about, whether that’s the murder rate in their country, how much household wealth the richest 1% own, or the share of immigrants in their country.
- These misperceptions sit in a broader climate of mistrust, impacting how we view experts and elites in our societies. Even trust in democracy is not immune to this – a 30-country average of one in four (24%) don’t think elections in their country ensure reliable results.
- Belief that misperceptions are primarily due to politicians misleading people has fallen six percentage points since 2018. However, politicians still have a long way to go to gain public trust and they remain at the bottom of the rankings in our Global Trustworthiness Index.
- Social media now receives the most blame for our misperceptions, with 45% on average across 30 countries citing it as the biggest reason why people are wrong about key social realities.
- People who report getting their news primarily via tv, radio or newspapers are more likely to trust scientists, elites and elections than those who get their news primarily from messaging apps, social media or from friends and family.
- The more time people spend on social media daily, the more likely they are to regard these topics with suspicion.
The 2024 context
As entered 2024, we asked the public what their predictions were for the year ahead.
While some were clearly off the mark (50% predicted that robots would look like, think like and speak like humans), others were more on the money. Fewer than one in three people (31%) thought the war in Ukraine would end and eight in ten (81%) expected average global temperatures to rise. Meanwhile, people in China, Italy and South Korea were well aware that their population was set to continue to fall this year.
However, over the course of the year our international Global Advisor research programme continues to find pockets where perception does not align with reality.
We found no correlation between public perceptions of increased crime & violence in their neighbourhood and ‘factual increases’. People are similarly poor at accurately estimating their risk of developing cancer or estimating the quality of their country’s education system. And when it comes to tackling climate change, we continue to overestimate the importance of low impact actions, while underestimating the importance of high impact actions.
All this fits within a broader context of (dis)trust, with many professions – politicians, journalists and business leaders among them – deemed more untrustworthy than trustworthy.
What’s new? What stays the same? After a decade of research, some things seem constant – our belief that crime rates are rising, our overestimation of the proportion of immigrants in the population. But we also see progress, with some improvements in our knowledge around climate change and – in some countries – in our accuracy in guessing how many people in our country are Muslim.