Beyond innumeracy: heuristic decision-making and qualitative misperceptions about immigrants in Finland

Abstract

Population innumeracy (the tendency to overestimate immigrant or minority population sizes) has sparked scholarly interest. However, erroneous size estimates are not the only consequential misperception. There are also qualitative questions that are prone to error, such as the most common origin of immigrants. Using data from the Finnish National Election Survey, the current study provides the first detailed examination of misperceptions about the primary source of immigration. I consider both their extent and correlates.Results indicate that about one-fifth are incorrect, with most faultily identifying Somalia as the primary origin. These misperceptions are related significantly to media exposure and demographic factors, suggesting that they are more than random ignorance. Source misperceptions are strongly associated with perceptions of cultural threat from immigrants, suggesting potential consequences for faulty views. Overall, findings indicate that innumeracy research should expand to include misperceptions beyond size.

Bias and ignorance in demographic perception

“…This individual would be subject to the standard psychophysical mechanisms that are known from other instances of proportional reasoning-mechanisms that have the potential to make the individual appear misinformed when completing a survey. This approach is in line with prior work in political science that has sometimes suggested that general numeracy and cognitive function may be important for demographic estimation (Alba, Rumbaut, & Marotz, 2005;Herda, 2015;Kunovich, 2012;Lawrence & Sides, 2014;Lundmark & Kokkonen, 2014). We expand on this argument by providing precise predictive models of the connection between demographic perception, general numeracy, and explicit demographic estimates, grounded in the prior literature on psychophysical transformations.…”

Public attitudes towards support for migrants: the importance of perceived voluntary and involuntary migration

“…Subsequent questions that should be examined empirically are why and when people endorse the view that most migrants have left their home country out of their own free will or rather have been forced to leave, and why these perceptions can exist simultaneously among the public. It is likely that the ways in which issues of migration are framed by the mass media and politicians play an important role in this (Blinder 2015;Herda 2015;Héricourt and Spielvogel 2014). Distinctions made between "real refugees" and "fortune seekers" can have important implications for how the public defines responsibilities and therefore how much support immigrants deserve or are entitled to.…”

Constructing Immigrants: Portrayals of Migrant Groups in British National Newspapers, 2010–2012

“…In any case, no one can fully apprehend the large‐scale phenomenon called “immigration” in this limited manner (Blinder ). This leaves room for media sources to help shape understandings of what “immigration” means and what “immigrants” are like — their identities, origins, and characteristics (Herda ).…”

“…Lippmann's rendering foreshadowed concepts such as schemas (Taylor and Crocker ), social representations (Moscovici ), and social cognition (van Dijk ) that proved useful in sociolinguistics as well as social psychology. Survey researchers often define public opinion more strictly in terms of policy preferences (Key ; Erikson and Tedin ), but recent studies of majority‐group attitudes toward immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities in the United States and Europe have taken a similar approach to public opinion, often explicitly citing Lippmann's notion of mental images (Wong ; Petersen and Aarøe ; Blinder ; Herda ). If public opinion indeed depends on such schemas, media portrayals may be critical for at least two reasons: not only do they provide evidence for pro‐ or anti‐immigration arguments, but they also become sources of mental images of immigrants that members of the public hold.…”