There is an excellent 4-in-1 infographic posted at The Economist this week, illustrating the prevalence of Muslim people in (mostly) Western Europe, among other data. I’ve excerpted just the map below:
It is interested to note that the general public tends to dramatically overestimate the number of Muslims in their own societies, typically by a factor of 3-5x. That seems to indicate some sort of systemically sloppy thinking, though it’s tricky to say what that might be. Xenophobia and the availability heuristic come immediately to mind, but probably there is much more to it than that.
Your thoughts?
