Replication Data for: Can Citizens Guess How Other Citizens Voted Based on Demographic Characteristics?

How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behaviour of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens' guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

民众对其所处社会中社会群体与政治分歧之间的关联认知程度如何？过往研究表明，人们对政党支持者的人口结构存在系统性认知偏差，但这并不意味着民众会误解特定个体的潜在投票行为。本研究报告了两项实验的结果：实验中，受试者获得了2017年英国选举研究（British Election Study, BES）受访者的随机抽取人口统计特征档案，随后被要求完成两项评估任务之一：（1）推断该个体在2017年英国大选中可能支持的政党；（2）判断该个体在2016年英国欧盟成员国身份公投中倾向于投票“留欧”还是“脱欧”。研究发现，尽管受试者在个体判断上存在显著的过度自信倾向，但民众的平均猜测结果大体上能够反映支持各政党与公投立场的群体实际分布情况。