How many people do we think belong to a certain group?

Contemporary American politics has a tendency to focus on identity, as commentators and politicians assure us. Yet we may be thinking about this pretty badly, according to a new YouGov report. If their poll is correct, Americans tend to massively overestimate some smaller group sizes while seriously underestimating larger ones.

As a futurist I’m fascinated by the results. What they reveal about contemporary American thinking suggests a lot of directions for politics and culture to take.

Here I’ll summarize the poll’s results, then offer some reflections.

YouGov surveyed around 2,000 people, asking them to estimate the proportion of Americans who belong to various groups. They selected group identities across a number of domains: religion, sexuality, economics, race, education, geographical location, household details, behavior, and more. Participants answered questions like “If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are [x]”? with percentages.

Some caveats: first, this isn’t a massive survey. I’d prefer a much larger one, with responses broken down into their own identities. Second, we might disagree on the numbers YouGov selected to represent reality. Polling on sexuality, for example, is notoriously variable and unreliable. Determining if a person is a member of a given religion has some different options and results. Racial identity gets into multi-racial complexity.