Malaysians not that ignorant

> Malaysia among five countries most accurate in identifying realities, says Ipsos survey

PETALING JAYA: Malaysians, it seems, are not easily swayed by perceptions and are not that ignorant.

Results of a Global Ignorance Index survey conducted by Ipsos placed Malaysia among the five countries in the world to be the most accurate in identifying realities.

Surprisingly, our neighbours in squeakyclean Singapore and Thailand were among the least accurate, taking the 7th and 8th positions in the “Index of Ignorance”.

Indonesia and the Philippines scored slightly better in the survey at number 10th and 16th respectively.

The 2016 Index of Ignorance produced by the consultancy group, includes information from 27,250 interviews of people aged 16 to 64 carried out between September and November.

The survey took in populations from 40 countries, with between 500 and 1,000 people surveyed in each.

Despite Malaysia doing fairly well in discerning perception from reality on key universal issues, the “Perils of Perception” survey found Malaysians to be among the worst in telling apart reality from perception in several issues like home ownership and healthcare expenditure.

“On health spending, we think we spend nine times as much as we actually do on our health.

“We think we spend 37% of our total GDP on health expenditure when in fact we only spend 4%. If our guess was right, this would be the equivalent of an extra RM350 billion spending on health,” Ipsos said in a statement accompanying the survey.

On how many Malaysians owning homes, Ipsos found that most of the respondents felt that only 44% of Malaysians own homes, when actually more than half of the country’s 30plus million population are homeowners.

“Most countries tend to massively underestimate how many households are owners or are buying their own home. We think just 49% of people own or are buying their home, when in fact 68% are owneroccupiers across these countries,” the report said.

Malaysians were also found to be among the top 10 most pessimistic countries.

“We think our fellow Malaysians are much more miserable than surveys of happiness show. We guess that only 44% of Malaysians would say they are very or rather happy, when actually 96% say they are, in a recent representative survey,” the report said.

Malaysians were also found to be the most ignorant about its population number.

While in most cases people were within 5% of the actual figure, less than 1% of Malaysians knew that the country’s actual population is 30.33 million. India receive the dubious honour of being the most inaccurate in their perceptions on these issues with China and the US also high up on the list.

2 CHINA 3 TAIWAN 4 SOUTH AFRICA 5 US 6 BRAZIL 7 THAILAND 8 SINGAPORE 9 TURKEY 10 INDONESIA 11 MEXICO 12 CANADA 13 MONTENEGRO 14 RUSSIA 15 SERBIA 16 PHILIPPINES 17 HONG KONG 18 ISRAEL 19 DENMARK 20 ARGENTINA 21 FRANCE 22 VIETNAM 23 PERU 24 SPAIN 25 CHILE 26 HUNGARY 27 JAPAN 28 BELGIUM 29 POLAND 30 COLOMBIA 31 SWEDEN 32 NORWAY 33 ITALY 34 GERMANY 35 AUSTRALIA 36 MALAYSIA 37 CZECH REPUBLIC 38 SOUTH KOREA 39 GREAT BRITAIN 40 NETHERLANDS