What we misjudge is not only an information gap, but a climate of trust.

There are sentences that circulate as if they were data. Yet most of the time, they carry a feeling and that feeling quietly replaces the number. Ipsos’ The Perils of Perception report begins exactly here: it argues that people systematically misestimate reality across many domains, and that these errors produce social and political consequences that go beyond simple ignorance. As the gap between perception and reality widens, it is not only facts that erode, but trust as well—trust in institutions, experts, and even in the reliability of elections (Ipsos, 2024).

One of the report’s most striking examples concerns migration. Across 30 countries, people estimate that 24 percent of their population are immigrants, while the report’s benchmark is 11 percent. In other words, perception is more than twice reality (Ipsos, 2024). This gap matters because once you believe an “immigrant share” is twice as large, you begin to live in a different country in your mind: more crowded, more pressured, more competitive, more threatening. And this is not only an Ipsos finding. Public opinion research has long documented systematic overestimation of immigrant populations; in Europe, this kind of numerical misperception has been reported consistently (Herda, 2010). Other work also suggests that such misperceptions can travel together with attitudes toward immigration (Citrin & Sides, 2008).

What I appreciate about Ipsos’ report is that it does not reduce misperception to a single cause. It maps a whole ecology: weak numerical understanding, cognitive shortcuts and bias, rational inattention, media, social media, politics, personal experience, and wider context (Ipsos, 2024). The issue is not simply that people are uninformed. It is how we think, and the environments in which we think.

Still, one result in the report lands with particular force: social media is now seen as the biggest driver of misperception. Across 30 countries, 45 percent of respondents cite social media as the main reason the public gets basic social realities wrong; difficulty with numbers and a biased view of the world follow closely at 42 percent (Ipsos, 2024). I read this as a simple but unsettling point: misperception grows not only from wrong information, but from the way information reaches us. This matters because beliefs about migration often do not shift easily through factual correction alone. People can hold strikingly inaccurate views about the size and characteristics of immigrant populations, and those beliefs can shape redistribution and social policy preferences (Alesina et al., 2018).

Another layer of the report is broader: when perception breaks, we do not only misjudge migration. We also misread the kind of world we live in. Ipsos places these distortions inside a wider climate of distrust. For example, across 30 countries, one quarter of people do not believe elections in their country produce reliable results (Ipsos, 2024). Even on its own, this suggests that the perception reality gap is not only informational; it is also tied to democratic legitimacy.

Some findings point to an even more troubling threshold. Ipsos reports that across 30 countries, 25 percent believe there is a plan by elites to replace the native population with immigrants from other cultures and religions (Ipsos, 2024). At this point, the issue is no longer the immigrant share. It becomes identity, boundaries, and conspiracy narratives. And such narratives rarely float in the air on their own. The way migration is spoken about at the national level—what becomes salient, what becomes normal—can shape perception. Recent work on European societies argues that immigration-related national discourses can be linked to how large people estimate the foreign-born population to be (Steinmann & Lubbers, 2025). Research on the relationship between elite rhetoric and public opinion on national identity similarly highlights that identity mobilisation cannot be understood only as individual psychology; political discourse matters (Helbling et al., 2016).

This is why the report’s calmest sentence may also be its strongest: perception is not reality. Ipsos suggests that when people feel anxious about an issue, they tend to inflate its scale—from homicide rates to the share of immigrants; as worry grows, the number grows too (Ipsos, 2024). This also helps explain why some data do not persuade in migration debates. Because sometimes a statistic does not correct a belief; it simply becomes another layer placed on top of an existing fear. When the problem is not only lack of information, the correct number is not sufficient. Because some debates do not run on numbers. They run on boundaries.

Then the issue shifts from how many to something harder: which story we believe, which source we treat as credible, which sentences we repeat and which we never hear. Ipsos shows that the perception gap around migration is not isolated; the same report points to a broader distrust climate, stretching from election confidence to conspiratorial beliefs about elites (Ipsos, 2024). In that climate, migration becomes not only a social phenomenon, but a symbol. And symbols move faster than statistics.

I want to end with one question: when we overestimate the immigrant share by a factor of two, are we only getting the number wrong or are we also revealing how we read the world, whom we trust, and whom we suspect?

References 

Alesina, A., Miano, A., & Stantcheva, S. (2018). Immigration and redistribution (NBER Working Paper No. 24733). National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w24733 

Citrin, J., & Sides, J. (2008). Immigration and the imagined community in Europe and the United States. Political Studies, 56(1), 33–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00716.x

Helbling, M., Reeskens, T., & Wright, M. (2016). The mobilisation of identities: A study on the relationship between elite rhetoric and public opinion on national identity in developed democracies. Nations and Nationalism, 22(4), 744–767. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12235

Herda, D. (2010). How many immigrants? Foreign-born population innumeracy in Europe. Public Opinion Quarterly, 74(4), 674–695. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfq013 

Ipsos. (2024). The perils of perception 2024. Ipsos. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-11/ipsos-the-perils-of-perception-2024.pdf 

Steinmann, J., & Lubbers, M. (2025). Misperceptions of the foreign-born population size in European societies. The role of immigration-related national discourses. International Journal of Sociology, 55(3), 215–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2025.2478738