Among the biggest misconceptions are:
- Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34.
This is for certain. People really do not understand the difference between benefit fraud and benefits being too freely available. A tiny proportion of benefit handouts are fraudulent.
- Immigration: some 31 per cent of the population is thought to consist of recent immigrants, when the figure is actually 13 per cent. Even including illegal immigrants, the figure is only about 15 per cent. On the issue of ethnicity, black and Asian people are thought to make up 30 per cent of the population, when the figure is closer to 11 per cent.
Again, very true. The hyperbole regarding immigration and the negative effects of it drowns out the actual facts about it and the benefits. British people despise change and don't know how to deal with it; if a Polish shop opens in a town centre then they instantly believe 50% of the population has to be Polish
- Crime: some 58 per cent of people do not believe crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19 per cent lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53 per cent lower than in 1995. Some 51 per cent think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012.
This is a bit of a misnomer. People realise that serious violent crime isn't as prevalent; however, people don't feel safer, due mostly to a perceived weakness in law and order, specifically youth crime. Crime has changed in nature, so the actual figures are a bit meaningless.
- Teen pregnancy is thought to be 25 times higher than the official estimates: 15 per cent of of girls under 16 are thought to become pregnant every year, when official figures say the amount is closer to 0.6 per cent.
Again, this is linked to the benefits culture myth. There's a belief that British youth are listless and that females think having a child is a career option. Whilst this is true to an extent, it's nowhere near as prevalent as people believe. That said, even 1 in 100 is an incredibly high stat for underage pregnancy given where our culture should be.
Among the other surprising figures are that 26 per cent of people think foreign aid is in the top three items the Government spends money on (it actually makes up just 1.1 per cent of expenditure), and that 29 per cent of people think more is spent on Jobseekers' Allowance than pensions.
In fact we spend 15 times more on pensions - £4.9 billion on JSA vs £74.2 billion on pensions.
Whether people are prepared to admit it, a large amount of Britons are mildly xenophobic. "Johnny Foreigner" is a term coined for a reason. A lot of our country do not not think geometrically, so it's completely unsurprising to see people blaming our economic problems on "giving our wealth away to foreigners". Similarly, the "scrounger" myth sees JSA as the countries biggest woe, when it's clearly not.
Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, said: "Our data poses real challenges for policymakers. How can you develop good policy when public perceptions can be so out of kilter with the evidence?
"We need to see three things happen. First, politicians need to be better at talking about the real state of affairs of the country, rather than spinning the numbers. Secondly, the media has to try and genuinely illuminate issues, rather than use statistics to sensationalise.
"And finally we need better teaching of statistical literacy in schools, so that people get more comfortable in understanding evidence."
Bobby Duffy, the managing director of Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute, said: "A lack of trust in government information is also very evident in other questions in the survey - so 'myth-busting' is likely to prove a challenge on many of these issues. But it is still useful to understand where people get their facts most wrong."
