TORONTO — Way to go, Canada! We’re not as ignorant as other countries of the world.
According to a new survey from Ipsos MORI, Canada ranks 32nd in The Perils of Perception 2017 survey. The good news? The United States fared even worse in 23rd place.
The study, says Ipsos, highlights how wrong the online public across 38 countries are about key global issues and features of the population in their home country. A total of 29,133 interviews were conducted between Sept. 28-Oct. 19, 2017 via the Ipsos Online Panel system.
“Across all 38 countries in the study, each population gets a lot wrong,” said Bobby Duffy, Managing Director of Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute, London. “We are often most incorrect on factors that are widely discussed in the media, such as deaths from terrorism, murder rates, immigration and teenage pregnancy.”
Duffy added that there are multiple reasons for these errors, “from our struggle with maths and proportions, to media and political coverage of issues, to social psychology explanations of our mental shortcuts or biases.” But based on previous studies, he added, “this is partly because we overestimate what we worry about: the more we see coverage of an issue, the more prevalent we thing it is, especially if that coverage is frightening or threatening.”
South Africa received the dubious honour of being the most inaccurate in their perceptions, with Brazil and the Philippines rounding out the top three.
Here is the complete list:
- South Africa
- Brazil
- The Philippines
- Peru
- India
- Indonesia
- Colombia
- Mexico
- Turkey
- Saudi Arabia
- Argentina
- Italy
- Chile
- Japan
- Malaysia
- France
- South Korea
- Hungary
- New Zealand
- Netherlands
- Hong Kong
- Poland
- United States of America
- Russia
- Germany
- Australia
- China
- Singapore
- Israel
- Great Britain
- Belgium
- Canada
- Serbia
- Montenegro
- Spain
- Denmark
- Norway
- Sweden
How well do you think you know your stuff about Canada’s top issues? Take the Ipsos quiz here: http://perils.ipsos.com/quiz/index.html
