The Distance between Perception and Reality in the Social Domains of Life

Abstract

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Inequality Perceptions, Preferences Conducive to Redistribution, and the Conditioning Role of Social Position

“…This logic does not only apply to inequality. In many domains, researchers have recently pointed out diverging trends between objective measures and subjective perception: Crime rates [48], violence [49], democratic governance [50], happiness [51], and other social domains, such as health, employment, security, and social ranking [52]. For the functioning of democracy, this divide is crucial.…”

Analysis and mapping of crime perception: A quantitative approach of sketch maps

“…The first objective of this study was to analyze the location of perceived unsafe areas in relation to the distribution of crime incidents and people's activity spaces. The participants identified safe areas closer to their neighborhood, which can be explained by the "endowment effect" [11]. Thus, people tend to have a perceptual bias due to a feeling of attachment towards their own community or neighborhood and value them "better" (i.e.…”

“…Regarding unsafe areas perceived as safe, this is usually related to heuristics or incivilities that some people make in areas where they are less familiar with or where they are not related. The fact that unsafe areas perceived as safe happens usually in people's own neighborhood, can be explained by the "endowment effect" which consists in assigning a higher or better value to the objects we possess, than to the same objects that we do not own [11]. In crime perception, this can be applied when people tend to characterize their neighborhood as safe, under the assumption that better conditions exist in areas where people live than other unknown areas.…”

Rankings analysis with the Optimized Pareto method.

“…For example, business schools make the generation of new structures or lines of thought difficult because a new area can correspond to a low rating in the indicators [15] or get a unfair adventange with the publication of poor quality papers in predatory journals [16]. Other studies show the impact of rankings on the perception of tourism [17] , security [18], [19], life quality [20] and proposing measuring alternatives in countries in the worst measures. In addition, there are studies that show how rankings are affected by the quality of the data used because there have been some problems with transparency and indicators with unexpected behaviors that add noise to the measurement [21], [22].…”