As famed American philosopher H.J. Simpson
once so eloquently put it, “facts can be used to prove anything that’s even remotely
true.” Well, join us today as we discuss 10 studies
showing that a not insignificant percentage of the American population believe in everything
from lizard people running to world, to HTML being an STD… 10. 7% of Americans think chocolate milk comes
brown cows In mid-2017 the American blogosphere erupted
with jeers and mockery following a study released by the Innovation Center of US Dairy showing
that some 7% of adult Americans believes chocolate milk came from brown cows. As others have pointed out, this amounts to
around 16 million American citizens (roughly double the population of New York City) being
unaware that chocolate milk is just regular milk with chocolate in it. Something you think they’d gather from…
well, the name. As the Washington Post points out, though,
the really shocking thing about this statistic is that it isn’t higher. Studies have long shown that Americans are
remarkably dense when it comes to basic agricultural knowledge, with studies variously showing
that upwards of 20% of American respondents don’t know that hamburgers are made from
beef or what foods common farm animals eat. The answer to the latter, of course, being
other farm animals. 9. Thousands of Americans believe they’re being
systematically harassed and stalked by groups of people, for no reason Gang stalking is the term used to describe
a very specific form of paranoia that affects an unknown, but not insignificant number of
Americans. In short, those who believe they’re being
gang stalked believe that they’re at the center of a systematic, targeted harassment
campaign involving hundreds, if not thousands of individuals. A fear needlessly stoked by internet echo
chambers, victims of this bizarre conspiracy quite literally believe that everyone is out
to get them to the point experts studying it have found individuals who believe their
dog has been replaced by an exact double that is trained to nip at their balls. According to the New York Times, the support
network of individuals claiming to be victims of this supposed phenomenon is “conservatively
estimated to exceed 10,000 members,” with the true number likely being way higher due
to gang stalkees naturally shying away from the internet and people in lab coats with
clipboards. Described as a “mishmash” of conspiracy
theories, reports of the phenomenon understandably spiked following 9/11 and those who believe
they’re being stalked have blamed everyone from the Jews to aliens. When in reality we all know it’s most likely
Jewish aliens. 8. A quarter of Americans believe God has a role
to play in who wins the Super Bowl According to questionnaires doled out shortly
before the Super Bowl one year, a sizeable percentage of quizzed Americans pray before
the big game to ask whichever deity they believe in to sway the result in their favor. This, in and of itself, is pretty normal,
right? We mean, people probably pray to God asking
for mundane stuff all the time, why wouldn’t they pray asking for their favorite team’s
kicker to have a good day. However, here’s the weird part… You see, an impressive amount of quizzed individuals
who admitted to praying for their team to win believe that prayer actively sways the
result of the game. Which is amazing, if you think about it, because
surely these people know the other side is also praying in roughly equal numbers to the
same God for their team to win. In other words, another way to look at the
results of this study isn’t that around a quarter of Americans believe prayer actively
impacts the results of the Super Bowl, but that a quarter of Americans believe that,
for some reason, God just so happens to support their team. 7. 12 million Americans believe lizard people
secretly run the US Oh boy, oh boy. This is going to be a fun one, so let’s
just get right to it. According to multiple studies conducted by
a range of establishments, it’s been suggested that anywhere upwards of 12 million Americans
(about 4% of the population) believe that interstellar lizard-men secretly run the world. Ignoring the fact that’s it not really that
big of a secret if 12 million people are supposedly “in” on it, and millions more are aware
of the theory via pop-culture osmosis, let’s unpack this. According to research conducted by the Pew
Research Center, depending on your definition, anywhere between 4 and 8 million Americans
are Jewish, meaning proponents of the Lizard-people-running-the-world theory outnumber the total believers of one
of the biggest religions on planet Earth by a factor of several million in the United
States. Believers in the Lizard also handily outnumber
the total number of American Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, and Buddhists combined if percentages
provided by Pew are accurate. This means more Americans believe that our
world is run by Lizards than believe in established religions that have existed for millennia. At this point followers of the Holy Lizard
should just start their own religion. At least that way they’d let the Lizards
know they’re onto them and weaken their overall lizardy-grasp on humanity be ensuring
they don’t get any of their taxes. 6. A bunch of Americans HTML is an STD According to a poll of America’s less tech
savvy residents aged 18 and over, some 11% reported that they thought HTML was the name
of a terrifying and hilarious-sounding sexually transmitted disease. But we’re not done; the study also found
that a decent amount (of the people quizzed) were almost hilariously computer illiterate,
reporting, among other things, that MP3 was the name of one of the robots in Star Wars. The poll also found that 18% of Americans
thought Blu-Ray was a kind of weird sea-creature and a further 12% assumed the acronym USB
referred to a country in some long-forgotten grey part of Eastern Europe. Not all is lost, though, because more than
61% did report that they felt having a good knowledge of technology and computer jargon
was an important life skill. So, yeah. 5. As many Americans believe in Bigfoot as the
Big Bang Theory In 2014, Chapman University conducted a study
to gather hard data on the ubiquity of irrational beliefs in regards to the American adult population. The results of the study, which are quite
illuminating on their own – revealing among other things that 20% of polled Americans
believe fortune tellers can predict the future – were then compared to similar studies
conducted on a similarly representative cross sample of American adults. The results, as you’ve probably guessed
by now, are kind of hilarious… in a terrifying sort of way. As the Washington Post and the title of this
entry note, about as many Americans (about 30%) believe in Bigfoot as their are Americans
confident that the universe began with a Big Bang. In a similar vein, just as many Americans
believe that ghosts and spirits can haunt specific rooms as responded positively to
the statement “childhood vaccines are safe” (about 50%), while slightly more Americans
agree with the statement “Satan Causes Most Evil in the World” (about 45%) than agree
with the theory of natural selection, which only 40% of representative American adults
admitted to believing in. 4. Almost 50% of Americans believe major news
outlets make stuff up about Donald Trump According to a 2017 poll conducted by Politico,
some 46% of respondents believed that major news organizations simply make stuff up about
Donald Trump. The results, which were understandably skewed
along party lines, found that an overwhelming majority of polled Republicans (76%) believe
the news regularly published or reported on untrue stories about the president. For comparison’s sake, only 11% of Democrats
agreed with the same statement. Most worryingly of all, 28% of those polled
reported that they’d be happy if the government had the power to revoke the broadcasting licenses
of news organizations it “believes” is spreading fake news, while a further 21% said
they were unsure if they’d be okay with this. Meaning at least a quarter of polled voters
would be happy for the government to have the power to instantly silence criticism it
doesn’t like. Luckily we don’t count as news, so it won’t
affect us. But jeez, the guy who wrote this is English
and even he thinks that’s government overreach. 3. A significant proportion of Americans believe
dinosaurs and humans coexisted Dinosaurs are awesome and it’s a shame that
they lived so long ago that the DNA locked inside their bones has long since withered
past the point of us being able to use it to clone them. As such, it’s understandable that some people
– let’s call them “heroes” – have steadfastly ignored science and facts to assert
that, actually, dinosaurs roamed the Earth a couple thousand years ago. While hard numbers are difficult to obtain,
one study asserts that some 41% of adult Americans believe that dinosaurs and humans roamed the
Earth at the same time during some period in history. In addition, thousands of children in the
US are currently attending schools that teach a fundamentalist curriculum. Along with teaching these kids that the Earth
is only 10,000 years old, some go further and assert that Adam and Eve chilled in the
Garden of Eden alongside cool-ass dinosaurs. Which, as adults, we find horrifying. But as big kids, we find that kind of awesome
because nothing was more disappointing as a kid than learning that our ancestors never
drop-kicked a T-Rex. 2. Half of Americans believe Global Warming will
harm America, but not them personally In recent years, more and more Americans have
come around on the idea of Global Warming being, well, a thing, with the latest figures
suggesting some 58% of Americans believe climate change is both real and man-made. As an aside, over 97% of climate change scientists
believe the same thing. Curiously, though, although more than half
of polled Americans admit that that climate change is real and poses a tangible, credible
threat to humanity as a whole, only 40% think that it will harm them “personally.” Which is, well… it’s an impressive feat
of mental gymnastics, if you think about it. Imagine having the mental capacity to understand
the harm global shifts in weather patterns can have on a macro level, but having no idea
how said changes would ever impact your own life. We mean, these people know that they live
on Earth too, right? LIke, any changes that impact the day-to-day
running of America will inevitably impact the lives of its citizens, right? This isn’t us being sarcastic, we genuinely
need to know because we’re kind of baffled about the results of this study. 1. Barely anyone in America knows anything about
the Constitution America is a country founded on the principles
of personal freedom and responsibility to the care of your fellow man. Or at least, most people assume it is, because
multiple studies have shown that a shocking amount of Americans know almost nothing about
the documents that formed the bedrock of modern American society. We are, of course, talking about the Constitution
and the first of many subsequent amendments made to it in the Bill of Rights. Countless polls and studies have shown that
the average American citizen knows almost nothing about the Constitution or has even
the most basic understanding of how the country works. For example, one study found that a third
of respondents couldn’t name a right protected by the First Amendment, and a similar amount
couldn’t name a single branch of government. Another study conducted way back in 1991 found
that a third of Americans couldn’t recognize the Bill of Rights, with 1 in 10 having no
idea why it was drafted in the first place. Further back still, in the 1950s a reporter
walked around on the 4th of July with the Declaration of Independence strapped to a
clipboard, telling people it was a petition. Of 111 people he asked to sign it, only a
single person recognized that the petition was actually the Declaration of Independence
and agreed to sign it. Meanwhile, 20 people accused the reporter
of being a communist and at least one person asserted that the document was actually the
Russian Declaration of Independence.
