The Perils of Perception - Bobby Duffy ****

How we see the world is not the way it really is. There have been several books based on this premise in the last few years, from Hans Rosling's impressive Factfulness to the distinctly fanciful The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. In The Perils of Perception, Bobby Duffy takes an approach that is similar to Rosling's in surveying large numbers of people in different countries (in fact, one chapter of the book specifically references Rosling), but rather than concentrate as Rosling does on the specific topic of development, Duffy takes a much wider sweep of coverage of our perceptions of our world - and just like Rosling finds that most of us are way off on our appreciation of how things really are.

Whether we're dealing with politics and immigration, finance, climate change, sex or crime, Duffy shows that the majority of people tend to get things wrong. (I think I've read too many of these books, as I tended, if anything, to err in the opposite direction to the average respondent.) Like Rosling, Duffy often finds that we're over-pessimistic, but discovers a number cases where we over-apply the rose-tinted specs. 

It seems – not entirely surprisingly – that topics with a strong emotional content are more likely to produce incorrect perceptions, and these are perceptions which will continue to be held despite contrary evidence. For example, in most countries, people think that the percentage of immigrants in the population, often an emotionally loaded topic, is considerably greater than it really is.

Like Rosling, Duffy looks for reasons for the difference between reality and perception and how the gap varies around the world. He agrees that we have a strong inbuilt protective bias to negativity, but suggests that cultures which put a strong emphasis on emotional content to argument (such as Italy and the US) tend to exaggerate values to make their point, while cultures that tend to be unemotional in their arguments (such as Sweden and Germany) tend to have perception that is closer to reality. We always have to bear in mind, though, that correlation is not causality, and though there seems a kind of logic to a tendency to exaggerate if you are imbuing an argument with emotion, the causal link has not been proved.

Overall, a good addition to our appreciation of how and why we get our understanding of the world so very wrong.

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Review by Brian Clegg