Does Everyone Agree With Me? Why the Right are Confident, and the Left are Insecure

A few weeks ago, I invited readers of this blog to take part in a little experiment. I wanted to find out whether people understood how popular their political opinions really were. Not whether they were right or wrong, but whether they had a realistic understanding of what other people thought.

The survey consisted of 30 questions covering everything from immigration and taxation to Brexit, crime and social attitudes. For each question, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement, and then whether they thought most people in Britain shared their opinion. The questions weren’t chosen at random. Before launching the survey, I established the balance of public opinion on each issue using published opinion polls. This gave us a benchmark against which to compare both the opinions of respondents and their perceptions of what other people believed.

This wasn’t neccesarily a representative sample of the British population, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. We already had representative opinion polling to tell us what the British public thought. What I wanted to discover was how accurately people from different political backgrounds understood those opinions.

The results were rather more interesting than I expected.

Who speaks for the majority?

One of the enduring features of political debate is the conviction that the speaker represents the views of ordinary people. Politicians regularly claim to be expressing what the public really thinks, usually while accusing their opponents of being hopelessly out of touch. Reform UK has made something of a speciality of this. Its supporters frequently present their opinions as those of a silent majority, frustrated by a political establishment that refuses to listen. But the idea isn’t confined to the right. Politicians of every persuasion have a tendency to confuse what they believe with what everyone else believes.

I wanted to test two things. First, how closely did respondents’ opinions correspond with those of the British public? Second, how accurately could they identify whether their opinions were shared by the majority?

The first question produced some fairly substantial differences between political groups.

Among Labour and Green supporters, approximately 73% of answers corresponded with the positions identified by our national polling benchmarks. Among Conservative, Reform and Restore supporters, the figure was approximately 46%.

The Liberal Democrats, perhaps unsurprisingly, occupied much the same territory as Labour and Green supporters, matching the mainstream position on around 71% of questions.

This doesn’t mean that Labour and Green supporters are right about 73% of political questions. Opinion polls don’t establish whether an opinion is correct, merely how widely it is held. Nor does it mean that Conservative or Reform supporters are necessarily wrong when they disagree with the majority. Some of the most important political changes in history began with opinions held by relatively small minorities.

But it does suggest that, across the issues we examined, the opinions of our left-wing respondents were considerably closer to those of the British public than those of our right-wing respondents.

That, however, wasn’t the most interesting finding.

Does everyone agree with me?

The second part of the experiment asked respondents to estimate whether their opinions were shared by most people in Britain.

This allowed us to identify two different kinds of mistake.

The first is what psychologists call false consensus. This occurs when someone believes their opinion is widely shared, even though it is actually a minority position.

The second is sometimes described as false uniqueness. This is the opposite mistake: believing that your opinion is unusual when, in fact, most people agree with you. Both involve misunderstanding public opinion, but they produce very different perceptions of the political world.

Imagine someone who believes that immigration is overwhelmingly unpopular, when the available evidence suggests a more complicated picture. If they also oppose immigration, they may conclude that their opinion represents the majority, regardless of what the polling actually says. Now imagine someone who supports a policy that commands majority support but believes that most people oppose it. They may regard themselves as holding a brave minority position when they are actually expressing a fairly conventional opinion.

Our survey suggests that these two mistakes are distributed very differently across the political spectrum.

The confidence of the right

Among Conservative, Reform and Restore supporters, approximately 31% of answers involved false consensus. Respondents held an opinion that differed from the national polling benchmark but nevertheless believed that most people agreed with them.

Among Labour and Green supporters, the equivalent figure was just 9.5%. In other words, respondents on the right were more than three times as likely, across all their answers, to make this particular mistake.

• Mainstream agreement: The respondent’s opinion matches the national polling benchmark.
• Perception accuracy: The respondent correctly identifies whether their opinion matches the benchmark.
• False consensus: The respondent holds a non-mainstream opinion but believes most Britons agree.
• False uniqueness: The respondent holds a mainstream opinion but believes most Britons disagree.

But when we looked at false uniqueness, the relationship was reversed. Labour and Green supporters believed their opinions were less popular than they actually were on approximately 22.5% of questions. Among Conservative, Reform and Restore supporters, the figure was just 4.1%.

The contrast is striking. Our right-wing respondents frequently assumed that their opinions were shared by the majority, even when the polling suggested otherwise. Our left-wing respondents were much more inclined to believe that their opinions were outside the mainstream, even when most people agreed with them.

There is an important statistical qualification here. Because our right-wing respondents held more minority opinions, they had more opportunities to make false-consensus errors. Similarly, left-wing respondents had more opportunities to underestimate the popularity of their views. These figures describe the errors made across all answers; they don’t yet establish how much of the difference reflects a separate tendency towards overconfidence or underconfidence.

Nevertheless, the overall pattern is intriguing. It suggests that two people looking at the same political landscape can come away with remarkably different impressions of where they stand within it.

Are people on the right simply worse at understanding public opinion?

Not necessarily. In fact, one of the more surprising results is that the two groups weren’t dramatically different in their overall ability to identify whether their opinions were mainstream. Labour and Green supporters correctly assessed the popularity of their opinions approximately 68% of the time. Conservative, Reform and Restore supporters managed around 65%.

That’s a relatively small difference, particularly given the number of respondents in each group. The interesting finding, therefore, isn’t simply that one side understands public opinion and the other doesn’t. Both groups frequently misjudge what the British public believes.

What differs is the direction of their mistakes. The right tends to overestimate the popularity of its opinions. The left tends to underestimate theirs. This raises a question that goes beyond the results of our little survey. What happens to political debate when different groups have fundamentally different perceptions of how much public support they enjoy?

Political affiliation	Mainstream agreement	Perception accuracy	False consensus	False uniqueness
Labour	72.6%	66.3%	9.5%	24.2%
Green	72.7%	73.6%	9.4%	17.0%
Liberal Democrat	70.8%	70.0%	6.2%	23.8%
Conservative	47.8%	74.4%	21.1%	4.4%
Reform UK	45.8%	59.2%	39.2%	1.7%
Restore	41.7%	61.7%	30.0%	8.3%

The silent majority and the imaginary minority

The idea of a silent majority has been a recurring feature of right-wing politics for decades. It suggests that the opinions expressed by politicians, journalists and other supposedly influential people are unrepresentative of what ordinary people really think. Sometimes that is undoubtedly true. Political and media institutions can become detached from public opinion, and there are plenty of examples of politicians discovering rather abruptly that voters don’t share their assumptions.

But the silent majority argument can also become a convenient way of dismissing evidence that an opinion is unpopular. If the polls disagree with you, perhaps the pollsters are asking the wrong people. If an election produces an unexpected result, perhaps the public has been misled. If most people appear to disagree, perhaps they’re simply afraid to say what they really think. This matters because at the next election the Conservatives, Reform and Restore are all likely to campaign on a relatively similar set of ideas. Ideas which they are convinced represent mainstream opinion.

The difficulty with an invisible majority is that it can be remarkably difficult to disprove its existence. The left has its own peculiar relationship with public opinion. Progressive campaigners often present themselves as challenging deeply entrenched attitudes, even when the positions they advocate have become widely accepted. This may partly reflect the history of progressive politics. Many social reforms were initially unpopular, and the idea of challenging conventional wisdom has become embedded in the political identity of the left.

But the status quo has changed.

There is a difference between challenging the majority and imagining that you’re challenging the majority. If you believe that your opinions are unpopular when they are actually widely shared, you may approach political debate with an unnecessary sense of defensiveness. You may also underestimate the electoral appeal of policies you support. Conversely, if you believe that most people agree with you when they don’t, you may struggle to understand why your preferred policies repeatedly fail to command majority support.

These are possible consequences of the perceptions identified by our survey, rather than conclusions the survey itself can demonstrate. But they are worth considering.

The political world inside our heads

There is another possible explanation for these findings. Most of us spend a considerable amount of time talking to people who share our opinions. Our friends, colleagues and social networks are rarely a random sample of the population. Nor are the newspapers we read, the television programmes we watch or the people we follow online.

Social media has made it particularly easy to construct a world in which almost everyone agrees with us. Algorithms are generally rather good at identifying what we like and providing more of it. They are considerably less enthusiastic about introducing us to people who might challenge our assumptions.

But political bubbles aren’t necessarily symmetrical.

Someone who spends their time in an environment where their opinions are constantly described as common sense may develop a very different perception of public opinion from someone whose political environment emphasises resistance, dissent and challenging established attitudes. That might help explain why the respondents in our survey made such different kinds of mistakes.

It might also help explain something that has puzzled me about contemporary politics: the extraordinary confidence with which some politicians and commentators claim to speak for the British people, even when there is little evidence that the British people agree with them. Of course, the same phenomenon can occur on the left. The important question is whether different political cultures encourage different assumptions about the popularity of their opinions.

Our survey doesn’t establish the answer, but it provides an interesting starting point.

What does this tell us?

There are obvious limitations to this exercise. I am not pretending that my respondents are a representative sample of voters. Party members are not homogenous. Labour and Green supporters don’t necessarily think alike, any more than Conservative and Reform supporters do. There are differences between the political parties that are obscured when we combine them into broad left-wing and right-wing categories.

And, as we’ve already seen, the tendency to overestimate or underestimate support needs to be distinguished from the simple fact of holding majority or minority opinions. But none of these limitations invalidate the result.

The survey wasn’t designed to measure the opinions of the British population. We already had opinion polls for that. It was designed to explore the relationship between people’s political identities, their own opinions and their understanding of what other people believe.

But what emerges is a fascinating contrast. Our respondents on the right were much more likely to assume that the public agreed with them, even when the evidence suggested otherwise. Those on the left were much more likely to assume that their opinions were less popular than they really were. Perhaps the most interesting thing about political disagreement isn’t simply that we believe different things. It’s that we have such different ideas about what everyone else believes.

Measure	Left	Right	Difference
Mainstream agreement	72.6%	45.6%	27.0 points
Perception accuracy	68.0%	64.8%	3.2 points
False consensus	9.5%	31.1%	21.6 points
False uniqueness	22.5%	4.1%	18.4 points

We may all inhabit political bubbles, but some of us appear to be living in bubbles where everyone agrees with us, while others are living in bubbles where we imagine almost nobody does. It is hard to ignore the role that social media plays in this and the way to amplifies particular view points.

And that leaves me with a rather uncomfortable question. If so many of us misunderstand what other people believe, how much of our political debate is really an argument about public opinion, and how much is an argument with a public that exists largely in our imagination?

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Does Everyone Agree With Me?