The Perils of Perception

Bobby Duffy uses exclusive research by the global polling firm Ipsos, carried out across 40 countries, to show how badly people misjudge basic facts about the world around them. The questions are concrete: how much sugar people eat, what share of their country's population are immigrants, how much tax the rich pay, what it costs to raise a child, and whether people know less than they once did. Drawing on recent research on the media and on decision science, Duffy asks why these errors arise, how they might be corrected, and why some countries seem better informed than others. Pitched for the so-called post-truth era, it suggests even well-educated people are likely to get these answers wrong.

Ella Botting, founder of CyberWomen, paired it with Factfulness as a guide to the biases behind everyday mistakes and said both helped her accept being wrong with good grace.