How many non-white people have you met on your way to the supermarket? It was probably less than you think. According to a study by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, people tend to overestimate the diversity in their own environment. They dubbed the cognitive distortion “illusion of diversity.” Members of the majority society and national minorities are equally affected by this trick on our brain, as the authors report in the journal »PNAS«.
In twelve experiments, a total of around 900 subjects were asked to weigh up how many people from an ethnic minority they saw – either on the university campus or in a photo collage. Both Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians put the proportion of Arab students at their university at around 30 percent. In fact, less than ten percent of those enrolled are Arabic. Tests in the United States painted a similar picture: Here, the participants misestimated the proportion of people of color in photos by more than 40 percent. Interestingly, there were no differences in the assessments between members of the majority society and members of the minorities.
“Our cognitive system focuses on what it doesn’t expect,” says Rasha Kardosh, first author of the study. Follow-up experiments revealed that the effect was independent of personal attitudes towards minorities. The fact that members of national minorities are just as susceptible to the illusion speaks in favor of this interpretation. Nevertheless, the misconception affects the acceptance of political measures. When the psychologists told their subjects that five percent of the students were people of color, the participants were more willing to support measures to increase diversity than when they were asked to estimate the number from a photo collage. Instead of relying on a feeling, one should clarify the diversity of society with the help of numbers.