Talking point: do not believe everything you read about ‘the french’

NICK INMAN GOES THE EXTRA MILE TO FACT CHECK A REPORT THAT ONE IN 10 FRENCH PEOPLE BELIEVE THE EARTH MAY BE FLAT “One in 10 French people believe the earth may be flat.” What an amazing

statistic, I thought: worth sharing widely on social media. That’s 6.5 million French men or women, give or take. It means 40 people in my village believe science has been lying to us all

this time, and at least 10 of my friends. Either that, or the entire population of Hauts-de-France is credulous in the extreme. READ MORE: WE FRENCH ARE NOT LAZY, THAT’S NOT WHAT TODAY’S

STRIKES ARE ABOUT WHERE DID THE STATISTIC ORIGINATE? I had no doubt this statistic was true because it was mentioned in a book called The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly

Everything, by Professor Bobby Duffy of King’s College London, who explains how we misperceive reality and fool ourselves into accepting misinformation. To be sure I was not misperceiving

the reality of the French men and women around me, I decided to find out where this statistic originated. It comes from a survey carried out by Ifop (the Institut français d’opinion

publique) on behalf of two respectable organisations, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and Conspiracy Watch. In 2017, Ifop worked out how to take a statistically valid sample across the French

population, got 1,252 selected individuals to answer the questions online, and the results you can read for yourself if you can be bothered to wade through them. READ MORE: FRANCE, A NATION

OF COMPLAINERS? YES, BUT IT’S A GOOD THING OF COURSE, THE FIGURE IS NOT TRUE For a start, the best you could get out of the data is that 9% of respondents agreed with the proposition that

the earth may be flat. That’s one in 11.11 people, which doesn’t sound half as good as one in 10. But there are further problems. Most of the 9% did not strongly agree; only 2% were adamant.

Adjust for this margin of error, as opinion pollsters say, and you get one in 50 French people believing the earth might not be round, as we are always told it is. However, earlier in the

survey respondents were asked if they had heard of the possibility the earth might be flat. Two-thirds (68%) said they knew nothing about it, so we would really have to say that only 2% of

32% know what they are talking about. We are now down to 0.64% of the French population willing to believe this particular conspiracy theory. That makes one in 156, far less impressive than

one in 10 and probably similar for any country on earth. NO BOX TO TICK ‘DON’T KNOW OR DON’T UNDERSTAND’ All this assumes that the respondents understood the question (which was worded

rather tortuously), were not drunk or trying to pacify crying infants as they clicked away on the survey pages, and that they were giving honest answers. They might not have been aware that

the survey was steering them in certain directions and even if they had realised it, what could they do? There was no box to tick for ‘don’t know and don’t care’, ‘don’t understand’ or

‘don’t ask such stupid questions’ because the survey was deliberately trying to get a shocking answer that would make a good headline and justify the expense of the exercise. DO NOT BELIEVE

EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT FRANCE The pollsters made the French news, as they had hoped, and must have been delighted to hear the statistic had crossed the Channel and turned up in a

scholarly book. I do not need to spell out the moral of this story: don’t believe everything you read or hear about France, and if a fact seems wrong, it probably is. Check it before you

broadcast it. It takes time and effort to get back to the original source, especially if it is in a foreign language, but if we do not, we let misinformation proliferate, and that is bad for

all of us. Now I must go and cancel all those social media posts I put online telling the world that my village is full of delusional, science-denying weirdoes. RELATED ARTICLES I’M

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