Bobby Duffy - 26 Nov

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I hated my psychology classes at college. As I remember them now, they were taught by a succession of super-smart, suave professors who all looked the same, closer to snake-hipped rock stars than fusty academics. They were all tall and slim, with haircuts that didnt play by professorial rules. They wore all-black clothes or, rarely, paisley shirts, and shoes that were just that bit too pointy. (I admit, jealousy may be clouding my own perceptions a little; in fact, I think Ive just described Russell Brand.) The students, of both genders, swoonedpartly because of the professors rebellious looks, partly because they seemed to know so much about how we thought. Theres nothing more attractive to most confused young adults than someone who really understands them.

But I had a problem with that. I hated the cognitive tricks that demonstrated we nearly all fall into the same mistaken ways of thinking. Theyd set us up with questions or experiments that were custom made to elicit a particular answer and show how typical our brains were. At that insecure but arrogant age, I wanted to be special and unpredictablebut my answers were just like everybody elses.

Take this example, from a professor at the University of Maryland:

You have the opportunity to earn some extra credit on your final grade. Select whether you want two points or six points added onto your final paper grade. But theres a small catch: if more than 10 per cent of the class selects six points, then no one gets any points, not even the people who chose two points.

Here is a very direct and teachable moment, a lesson in the tragedy of the commonswhere individuals try to obtain the greatest benefit from a particular resource, taking more than their equal or sustainable share, and therefore ruin it for everyone, including themselves. Of course, the class conformed to type, and failed. Around 20 per cent selected six points, so they all got nothing. In fact, only one class in one semester over the eight years the professor had been conducting his mildly cruel experiment had actually managed to get the extra points.

Given my lingering sensitivity to psychological tricks, its not without irony that a lot of my working life has been focused on running similar tests. I spent twenty years at opinion research firm Ipsos MORI, designing and dissecting research from around the world to help understand what people think and do, and why. Im now a (definitely not snake-hipped) professor at Kings College London, focusing on the same challenges of public delusion, and what they mean for public policy. Across these roles, Ive run hundreds of surveys on public misperceptionswhat we call the Perils of Perceptioninvestigating a range of social and political issues, from sexual behaviour to personal finance, across a large number of countries. We now have over 100,000 interviews, across forty countries on some questions, allowing us to weigh up our perceptions against reality. This is a unique and fascinating source of data on how we see the world, and why were often so wrong about it. Previous work has tended to focus on one issue or sphere of life, and few get beyond a handful of countries. You can dig into the full set of Ipsos studies at www.perils.ipsos.com

Across all the studies and in every country, people get a lot wrong on nearly every subject weve covered, including immigration levels, teen pregnancy, crime rates, obesity, trends in global poverty, and how many of us are on Facebook. But the key question is Why?

Lets start off with a question thats got very little to do with the sort of social and political realities well look at later, but helps to highlight why there might be this gap between perceptions and reality: Is the Great Wall of China visible from outer space? What do you think? If youre anything like the population in general, theres about a 5050 chance that you answered yes, as surveys show that half of people say they believe the Great Wall is visible from space. Theyre wrongits not.

At its widest, the Great Wall is only nine metres across, about the size of a small house. Its also built of rock that is similar in colour to the surrounding mountains, so it blends in with the landscape. When you take a bit of time to think about it, the idea that the Great Wall is visible from space is actually slightly ridiculous, but there are some very good reasons why you might have thought it is.