All the numbers on this chart make no goddamn sense. Even the most right wing of fox news watching nutjobs wouldn’t say there are %20+ trans people in the USA. They always claim it’s like 3 people and that’s why they need to ignore them/they don’t matter.
I need to see the region they polled in. Preferably the exact counties because these numbers don’t make sense for either of the extreme sides answers, but also the moderates wouldn’t answer some of these questions these ways either.
Who TF did they get answers from??
I’m not buying that atheist one.
I bet if we’re going by self-report, a lot of people who “aren’t religious” still shy away from the atheism label.
33% Atheist
27% Muslim
30% Jewish
58% Christian (41% being Catholic, so that’s about 70% of all Christians)This just proves that Americans do indeed have more people per capita.
The income estimates are interesting.
We’re apparently quite bad at estimating all income levels except who earns $100,000-$500,000 / year.
I think it’s because $100k-$500k is a good range for the “rich” people that you normally interact with. That would cover things like lawyers, surgeons, engineers.
How tf car-brained USAinians in a car-dependant society assume only half the population owns a car?
Or that a fifth/a quarter of the country is Muslim/transgender/living on a million per year?
Or that NY is a third of the USA?Is this data just bs?
The NY one is wild. But cars I can see. Couples who share and teenagers.
Ok, yes, but the average answer was 50% (edit: 66%), so half of the people assumed less than 50%.
I should have clarified that by ‘is data bullshit’ I meant it as the surveys work/overall effort - eg unclear questions or not making sure (actively or passively) if folk actually understood the question. It could be something stupid as a matter unclear ‘owns’ or ‘doesn’t own’, so people were answering in two ways ‘90% own’ and ‘10% don’t own’ … of witch the average is then the bs 50% bcs it’s the and metric.
This is just one example of seemingly the simplest things going wrong in surveys & statisticians not having the data/balls to detect issues from datasets or rule the data in question out.Asking people questions is hard. They are people after all.
Or that 90% have high school degree. Either the education is terrible or the stats are bs.
Regardless of if the stats are accurate, I can assure you the education is terrible.
Clearly 24%(=89%-65%) of the population with a highschool degree give the impression they don’t have it.
Tbh that seems fair, perhaps a bit low :D.
Live in NYC could be 5%-6% for greater area. Self reported Atheism can be influenced by wanting to be in an in group. Its more than 3%.
How is driver’s license possession lower than car ownership?
Licenses are cheap, cars can be shared, people tend to get a license before they get a car too. You would expect licenses to be more common than ownership. Also no matter how many cars you own, it only counts as one for this stat, one car owner can own many cars and still be just one car owner.
Ah, New York City, population 120 million.
It says 3% of Americans are atheists, but about 29% of Americans are “religiously unaffiliated”. I would say the poll only overestimated by 4%.
People can be agnostic too, I think religiously unaffiliated doesn’t mean they are atheist but the reverse is true.
Tbh unless a survey specified otherwise I would think it just means not religious.
Read the linked source.
the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’
Many of the unaffiliated retain religious beliefs or practices without affiliating.
One fifth of the US public and a third of adults under the age of 30 are reportedly unaffiliated with any religion, however they identify as being spiritual in some way. Of these religiously unaffiliated Americans, 37% classify themselves as spiritual but not religious.
Affiliation is about which community you are affiliated with. It’s not about beliefs at all, actually. Affiliated means “I would call myself an X”, and if you are not affiliated with a certain group, you are not affiliated, no matter if you are atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious or even religious but not strong enough to actually affiliate with one group.
Remember, atheism is a belief in itself, contrary to agnosticism. Atheism is the conviction that no God exists, even though there’s no proof for an absence of a God. Agnosticism on the other hand is acknowledging that there is no proof that God does or doesn’t exist, so they just don’t care about it.
Atheism is in many ways similar to a religion. There are communities formed around the shared belief that God doesn’t exist, they preach that God doesn’t exist, they study their literature to find proof that God doesn’t exist. They defend their faith that God doesn’t exist, like any religious person would defend theirs. There are even atheist missionaries who stand on street corners preaching that God doesn’t exist.
To be an Atheist is to believe so strongly that God doesn’t exist that it becomes something like a religion in itself, and that’s rather rare.
Agnosticism on the other hand is really wide-spread, even within religiously affiliated people. There are tons of religiously affiliated people who are socially religiously affiliated but are actually agnostic (“All my friends and family are X. I don’t really care whether God exists or not, I don’t really believe in the spiritual teachings of my faith, but I’m not that much at odds with it that I can’t live as an X, and denouncing the faith would lead to repercussions, so I’ll just formally keep being X, because it’s less hassle.”).
People think that 1/5 americans are trans? Billionaire owned media really does shit in our brains, huh?
That struck me too. 1 in 5 are trans? Who are these people they polled?
the people who answer polls
It doesn’t surprise me. With how much focus there is on issues like trans athletes in the media and politics, people incorrectly assume the actual number of people “at issue” is in proportion. This is how we get state legislatures spending huge amounts of time creating legislation that will impact like three people.
But like, do they not notice that every fifth person they meet isn’t trans?
Maybe they think all the trans people are in some other part of the country like New York or California, or maybe they think that trans people are so indistinguishable from cis people that anyone they meet could be secretly trans?
That could explain the paranoia that some people have about trans people. And also why people e.g. think that Daniel Radcliffe’s wife is trans because she’s taller than him (even though they have a child together, but then again, maybe these people think that transwomen can get pregnant.).
maybe they think that trans people are so indistinguishable from cis people that anyone they meet could be secretly trans?
Yet they’ll claim “they can always tell” when it comes to yelling at a cis woman trying to use the bathroom.
And in the end they just yell at a menopausal woman who can’t afford hormone replacement therapy.
Hell, they’ll yell at cis women that are just taller than average or have a short haircut. Or, even more likely, is a PoC.
And these are the averages. Which means for every answer that accurately said 1%, someone said 39% (or two people said 30%)
Which means they think if they know two other people, one of them must be trans. Or more likely, that entire cities of “others” (that they’ve never been to) must be trans.
I feel like this is largely because if you can identify one trans woman, and are right, you think everyone who looks that way is also one. (Because sorry transmasc, you don’t exist to society as anything more than feminine gay man)
Which is why cis women, especially butch women, are frequently accused of being trans… we don’t meet the stereotype of femininity, and thus must be men, rather than just… women who aren’t hyperfeminine…
I’d like to know how large their sample size was. I mean, this was yougov, so I expect at least some level of credibility to this, but depending on how large the same size is and how biased your selection is, you can get some really weird numbers.
E.g. do the same study with some old KKK members or with a school class in a black, impoverished neighbourhood or with a group of CEOs and you will get very different results.
Definitely depends on the spaces they exist in, too. I only recently learned I was wrong about how many black people there are in the US. Turns out they’re just “overrepresented” in the media I consume and I’ve lived most of my life in very diverse neighborhoods. Similarly, trans topics overrepresent the amount of trans people in a lot of online spaces and people tend to extrapolate when they only have all the data. I can see why a terminally-online individual would feel like there’s a trans epidemic.
I mean, the way the internet talks I thought I was the only straight person left.
Wait, atheism is that low in the US?? 38.9% of Australians indicated no religion at the last census, I knew we had more but never expected a whole order of magnitude difference!
That number is wrong.
28% of people in the US don’t have a religion. People here just don’t like the word atheist.
“Don’t have a religion” includes
- Atheists
- Agnostics
- Spiritual but not religious people
- Religious but unaffiliated people
Saying “don’t have a religion” equals atheist is like claiming that everyone who didn’t vote for Trump or Harris is an anarchist.
That 3% atheist figure is drastically lower than the global 10-15% and probably misleadingly low because identifying as an atheist on a survey and functionally being an atheist aren’t the same thing.
I understand that no religion =/= atheist, but when you look at these other ‘atheist adjacent’ stats like “no religion”, they don’t reflect a population that’s as religious as “3% atheist” would suggest.
We’re probably just seeing problems with the word atheist in the US, not a true accounting of how religious people are here.
Not having a religion =/= atheist in surveys like this.
Believing there is no god is still a belief. Not having a religion means you dont subscribe to any belief
To paraphrase a famous quote: Saying atheism is a belief is like saying not playing tennis is a sport.
There’s no proof for or against God, just by the simple fact that God could just not care and not get involved, and such a God would be neither provable or disprovable.
The only position that can be logically drawn from that is the agnostic one: “I don’t know whether God exists or not, and I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me.”.
Atheists on the other hand are in a position that doesn’t logically follow from the evidence. They believe that there is no God. It is a belief, because it cannot be logically derived from the evidence. And there are lots of Atheists who live their atheism like a religion. They study their literature to build a belief system, to find evidence, to disprove others. They meet up (online or physically) to talk about their non-belief and to hone their arguments. They strongly defend their position in discussions. I’ve even met Atheist missionaries who stand on street corners preaching that God doesn’t exist.
To respond to your quote: Not playing tennis would be agnosticism. Atheists are running around the field, following the players and shouting in their ears that tennis sucks. They are playing, just a different sport.
That doesn’t make any sense. Believing the absence of something is still a belief.
The more famous, and more apt comparison would be, “if you choose not to decide, youve still made a choice.”
You are conflating faith with acceptance. I don’t believe in science I accept science as fact and do not accept superstition as anything more than superstition. I don’t have a belief that there is no god I simply have no evidence to support their existence. If there were evidence to support the existence of a supreme being then there would no longer be any need for faith.
Which takes me back to my first point. Believing there is no god is not the same as “no religion.” The survey has clearly delineated the two seeing as the atheist group is 3% and other surveys have shown “no religion/religious affilitation” to be as high as 30%
Your first point is wrong, you repeating it doesn’t make it more true.
Atheists don’t necessarily believe there is no god. Not believing that there is is not the same as believing that there’s not
I think we are saying the same thing
I think I get what you’re saying. As far as the poll goes, it calls “a belief in the nonexistence of any gods” “atheist,” and it calls “a lack of any religious beliefs” “no religion.”
I just wanted to clarify that the poll is incorrect, and that “atheist” encompasses both sets of people
OP was talking about non-religiously identifying Australians, and comparing it to Americans who identify specifically with the term atheist, I was providing a more apt number.
Yes, this chart is bogus. In the last 5 years Gallup estimates of the LGBT population have gone from 5% to 7.6%, not 3%. And there’s no way people who understand how to eat soup or wear pants would think 30% of Americans live in New York City.
Atheism still has a stigma associated with it here. Not sure now, but there were surveys less than 10 years ago saying that Americans were less likely to vote for an atheist than for a convicted felon (and this was before Trump!). Other polls often use the term “Nones” to refer to people who don’t affiliate with a major religion, but that tends to include atheists, agnostics, areligious people, and some others thrown in there.
There’s a good explainer here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
That poll has 17% of Nones as atheist, which would be about 5% of the population, just above the 3% in the chart from OP. Although I bet part of the “agnostics” are agnostic atheists, but don’t use the term. That being said, Pew also has this page: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/age-race-education-and-other-demographic-traits-of-us-religious-groups/#age
That shows that people under 50 are way different. 73% atheist of 69% None is about 50%, which means that a full half of Americans under 50 identify as atheist. So, a BIG generational gap.
I mean yeah, I don’t identify with the term atheist because it ended up shifting meaning to anti-theist on the internet in my opinion. I guess I just conflated it with “no religion” in my head, which is what the Australian statistic is.
I also don’t relate to the term cause I just don’t participate in religion at all. From my experience most people who call themselves atheists are (ironically) religiously opposed to religion. It’s just as exhausting as the fundamentalists even if I relate more to the belief.
Given that the “estimated proportion” range is only between 20-76%, regardless of the question, this seems more indicative of a poor understanding of statistics than an over/under estimation of specific demographics, especially since a lot of contradictory demographics are way overestimated.
For example, I am significantly more likely to believe that Americans suck at percentages than that they believe nearly ever single person in the country is either Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic (these three “estimated proportions” add up to 98%).
Side note: interestingly all religious categories listed add up to 189%, but there is some overlap depending on definition (e.g. some people might argue that “Catholics are Christians” or “Jewish is an ethnicity so you can be Jewish and atheist”). Thus I picked the three that most people would agree are extremely unlikely to overlap, which coincidentally added up to nearly 100%.
EDIT: I would like to see this survey redone with the same questions, but with the addition of a few questions for things that are widely known to be extremely uncommon, bordering on non-existent, such as “percentage of people with only one ear” or “percentage of people with more than 12 siblings,” and some questions for things that are widely known to be extremely common, bordering on universal, such as “percentage of people that have electricity at home” or “percentage of adults who own a phone.” If even these questions result in answers grossly over/underestimating the percentage, what we have is actually an aversion to providing very small or very large estimates. (It is already known that people easily overestimate the frequency of things that are unusual especially if they can easily think of an example, such as overestimating the number of redheads because you had a classmate with red hair, or even because you can think of a celebrity with red hair).
Try adding up ethnic groups. If you count Jewish as a separate ethnicity, you get an estimated total of 225% and even without Jews it’s still 195%.
Don’t mistake aggregate with individual responses. In aggregate a survey sample might result in a sum of 98% are Muslim, Catholic or Jewish but no individual selected that sum. We could imagine a scenario where each individual chose one of those as a large majority, for example.
That said, it is true that many people really don’t understand data and it’s implications and tend to consistently overestimate many unlikely probabilities. Source: I teach statistics…
What? Of course Catholics are Christians. It’s literally a denomination of Christianity, a proper subset.
I don’t disagree, but I have seen surveys before that list Catholic and Christian as separate mutually exclusive categories (as in they used “Christian” to mean “Protestant”) and Protestant is not listed in the graphic in question so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Those listings are misinformation though. So equally as wrong as the people who took this poll, and not something you should base your knowledge of the subject on.
I found it unbelievable as well so I tested these questions on college and graduate students. Answers were in range. CS majors literally believed that 40% of Americans are black and a third of the population lives in Texas.
What a person needs to answer correctly is sociocultural awareness.
I think this still shows a poor grasp of percentages/statistics. If you were to follow up the Texas question by asking in turn, “what percentage live in California?” " How about New York?" “And Florida?” “So then what percentage live in the 46 remaining states plus US territories?” you’d watch a classroom of students slowly realize they’ve way surpassed 100% thanks to their overinflated initial estimates. Or conversely, if you gave them a paper with a list of states and asked them to write down what percentage of Americans lived in each state next to the state’s name, it might not be accurate, but it would probably add up to 100% for significantly more respondents.
The over/under estimation problem is almost certainly worsened when you ask about a single demographic in isolation, rather than all possible demographics at once.
I wonder if the questions were phrased like “none/some/many/most/all” and not percentages?
I don’t know how else a significant sample size would end up with an average guess that 1/3 of the US population lives in NYC.
This list is Wild. Like two thirds live in Calif & Texas loool
Also 41% are black.
90% live in CA, TX, and NYC! Sounds right to me I can’t think of a single other large metro area or anything like that.
DO YOU NEED ANY MORE PROOF?? I knew Phoenix was a myth! How can a city built in the most inhospitable place on Earth could ever have 1.5M people living (if you can call it that) in it. The name is clearly a connection to a mythical bird and everyone knows birds aren’t real (anymore, follow my blog). I MEAN who would ever believe that a place that gets 110 °F easily could ever had a hockey team…
#PhoenixIsAMyth #BirdsAreNotReal #TheNumbersDontLie
It is an affront to God
No, that thing is just wrong. They “interviewed” two groups of 1000 people online who had opted into their “panel”. Either they’re lying about bias, or they were scammed.
The easiest giveaway is the “40% of adults are veterans” number. The average American is well aware that almost half their aquientances are not veterans.
This looks like a poll conducted entirely among silicone valley tech bros.
The U.S. Census Bureau did an online poll of 1000 people? Where did you find that information? Even the short description lists 3 sources by name. But yeah people guessing 30% of the population lives in NYC is crazy. Strange guesses
They listed sources for the “True Proportion”, but not the estimates. It doesn’t actually say who they asked for the “Estimated Proportion” figures.
I urge anyone who doubts these results to test them on people they know. Yes, Americans, even those with college degrees, are incomprehensibly ignorant.
My takeaway is that people are pretty good at estimating how many people have children and voted in 2020.
The voting in 2020 thing was probably not a guess or estimation, but a remembered factoid from reporting around the last election.
Wow you guys need better media and media literacy, these are wild levels of disinformation
Nearly half the population apparently having been in the military, 1 in 5 trans, 1 in 3 gay or lesbian. Do these people imagine entire battalions of non cishet people?
Do these people imagine entire battalions of non cishet people?
sacred band of thebes, US military edition
Youre right on the media. Veterans are tauted every opportunity they get, mean while theyre passing bills against transgender athletes that are literally impacting like 2 people. Where the media focuses is where people think the numbers are
