Looking into it, it seems to be a bit too easy to just do the “haha, Americans are stupid” trope due to the nature of the survey. From what I could understand, the survey itself was a multi topical survey and only two of the questions submitted to the survey were about statistics and people’s understanding of them and only one of the questions is directly about whether or not people understand statistics.

Ramos and his co-author, Samuel Anyaso-Samuel, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, submitted two questions that were used in this survey: “How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?” and “How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?” Ramos and Anyaso-Samuel analyzed the responses to these questions for this study.

I will be completely honest: if I was given those two questions out of the blue, I would probably answer somewhere in the negative even if I actually know what the p-value practically.

Naturally, this is just perception of statistical literacy and not a measurement of actual literacy, but we contend that it is at least a meaningful indicator of how confident respondents feel engaging with statistical concepts.

Link

It is not the best survey to reference when it comes to Americans’ statistical literacy imo, because it is essentially just one question that doesn’t really explore the depth of knowledge people have with statistics. All it does is show that many people aren’t sure they understand the concepts on the surface, which I think is completely normal and human to do. I doubt my own knowledge and understanding of things all the time. Even things I’m pretty comfortable with, I always assume, I don’t know shit. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s like this. Far from it.

Is it probable that some or even most of the people answering the survey are ignorant idiots who don’t understand the basics of statistics? Yes. But if we ignore how and what the survey actually was and what types of questions were asked, then we are basically selfreporting, that we also don’t understand statistics because we had a confirmation bias that made us not look into how the survey was conducted.

I say this as someone who has a very low opinion on America as a nation and who is also terrible at math. I just looked at the headline, read the article and clicked on the available link to parts of the survey to try and understand how they came to the conclusions they did. Because initially I assumed it was a test about people’s understandings of statistics and that it was more in depth, but it’s literally just one vague question in a mulit topic survey.