Social engineering in media is used because it works, addendum

Some time ago I wrote about the skewed perceptions that many people have about the demographics of their own country, no doubt caused by the over-representation of particular demographic groups in media, compared to their actual proportions in the country. More particularly, polls have shown that a sizeable proportion of Americans believe that about 50% or Americans are black, and a sizeable proportion of Britons believe that about 25% of British residents are black, when in reality the numbers are actually about 13% and 3% respectively.

I commented in that post that this particular misconception is relatively harmless, but it's scary to think what more harmful misconceptions can be inculcated into the population via social engineering and propaganda.

An example of a more worrying such misconception is a poll that was conducted in the United States which asked "how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?"

Five possible choices were given: "About 10", "about 100", "about 1000", "about 10000", and "more than 10000".

From those who described themselves as "very liberal" over half responded with "about 1000" or higher. Almost 8% chose "more than 10000".

The responses get closer to the actual number the more conservative the person, but even with moderates and conservatives there was still a quite sizeable portion of people who answered with "about 10000" or "more than 10000". (From people who described themselves as "moderate" almost 10% chose one of those answers. From people who described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative" about 5% chose one of those answers.)

As you might perhaps have guessed, the correct answer is "about 10".

Only people who described themselves as conservative got a majority of them giving that correct answer. Moderates and liberals answered with "about 100" or "about 1000" in larger numbers than "about 10".

It's actually scary to think how many people there are in the United States who actually believe that the police kills thousands, even tens of thousands, of unarmed black men every year.

It's not hard to guess where they got that idea.