“Most Americans are pro-life.” So said the conservative group Heritage Action in 2022. It’s not surprising that a conservative group would want to believe that most Americans are conservatives.
What may be more surprising is that many people are like Heritage Action. There is a chronic tendency to believe Americans are more pro-life than they really are.
It’s true for state legislators. In a 2014 survey, legislators were asked what percentage of people in their district agreed with this statement: “Always allow a woman to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice.” Across the districts represented by these legislators, 55% of people agreed. But when state legislators were asked what people in their district thought, legislators said 46% agreed, on average. They underestimated pro-choice sentiment by 9 points. Republican legislators underestimated it by even more: 15 points. Democrats underestimated it by 6 points.
Voters have the same misperception. In a newly published study, scholar Giulia Fornaro asked Americans in a February 2023 survey whether they supported or opposed abortion under seven different circumstances, such as if the pregnancy resulted from rape, if there was a defect in the fetus, or if the woman simply wanted an abortion. She also asked them what they perceived overall opinion to be.
Just like the state legislators, respondents perceived overall opinion to be more conservative than it was. Moreover, those misperceptions were larger among those who were conservative themselves as well as those who explicitly identified as pro-life.
In both studies, then, there is evidence of “egocentric” bias or the “false consensus” effect: We assume others think like us. “If I’m pro-life, most Americans are too.”
These patterns are not unique to abortion. There is a tendency to perceive opinion on other issues as more conservative than it is. These patterns are not unique to these particular samples of state legislators or voters, either. The same tendency and egocentric biases were found in a study of senior staff in the U.S. Congress – although that study didn’t ask about abortion.
We shouldn’t assume that misperceptions always favor the conservative side, or that only conservatives have misperceptions. Fornaro found that strong liberals also had some egocentric bias of their own.But on the issue of abortion in particular, it appears that many people, especially on the right, underestimate the public’s liberalism. We’ll see if the Trump administration makes the same mistake.
