People are wildly wrong when we ask them about many aspects of life in Britain. It’s perfectly understandable that we don’t having a precise image of who lives here and the extent of key social issues – but the scale of our collective error is startling, as highlighted in a new survey by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London.
Just to pick out three: on average, we think 24% of the population are Muslims – when the real figure is around 5%; we think 31% are immigrants – when the official figure is 13%; and we think 36% are aged 65+ – when in fact only 16% are.
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