One of the misperceptions is that people segregate into these binary positions, that we either support all types of animal research or we condemn everything, and it's not true.
Insofar as the GDS-sample was biased towards a heavy drinking sample, the results of this study are likely to be an overestimate of the overall population prevalence because the consumption comparator (from which the misperceptions were calculated) would be higher than from the general population.
Politicians' right-skewed misperceptions exceed 20 percentage points on issues such as gun control where these misperceptions are the largest and persist in states at every level of legislative professionalism, among both candidates and sitting officeholders, among politicians in very competitive districts, and when we compare politicians' perceptions to voters' opinions only.
The misperception is you have to fill it up with batteries and not carry anything," Mr. Stempel said.
"I think the misperception is that it's all about courting Tony voters," said Jed Bernstein, the president of the League of American Theaters and Producers.
The theory, pioneered by Claude Steele, suggests that, when people feel their sense of self threatened by the outside world, they are strongly motivated to correct the misperception, be it by reasoning away the inconsistency or by modifying their behavior.
"The misperception is schools first look at all the kids who can pay full freight and then look at the kids who are left over," said Kalman A. Chany, a financial aid consultant in New York and author of "Paying for College Without Going Broke".
Notes: The misperception index is computed according to Eq. 1 (i.e., the difference between the perceived and the actual unemployment rate in the country); its absolute value is the regressor in line 1; in line 2, the absolute value of the misperception index is interacted with a dummy variable equal to one if the misperception is negative and zero otherwise.
More educated workers provide a more accurate estimate of the country's unemployment rate (the misperception is reduced by 4 percentage points in the case of upper secondary education and by 8 p.p. in the case of tertiary education, when compared to the omitted category of lower educational levels).
"In trying to reveal what's happening overseas, the misperception was that what was happening here within the law was fair and equal," Theoharis said.
The revelations come as an embarrassment to Western media outlets that have been claiming for three years that people from Tunisia to Syria were engaged in popular uprisings, as it becomes apparent that the misperception was a result of a multitude of translation mistakes by reporters and commentators who are not sufficiently versed in Arabic.
