[Negotiator]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2 ... 9#abstract

America is embroiled in cultural wars over abortion, immigration, gun control, climate change, religion, race, gender, and everything in between. Do people know how much attitudes have shifted on these contentious issues, or even which side is winning? Two preregistered studies suggest they do not. In Study 1, we asked a nationally representative sample of participants to estimate how 51 different attitudes had changed over time and compared their estimates to actual polling data. Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). In most cases, participants did not know whether an attitude had grown to a majority or shrunk to a minority. These misperceptions had little to do with participants’ demographics or ideologies and seemed instead to arise from a stereotype that the present is far more liberal than the past. Indeed, in Study 2, participants overestimated the liberal shift on most attitudes, believing that the liberal side had gained ground that it had in fact lost (e.g., gun control), or already held (e.g., climate change), or never held (e.g., religion). In three additional preregistered studies, we found that these misperceptions could justify policies that would otherwise seem objectionable. Overall, our findings suggest that widely shared stereotypes of the past lead people to misperceive attitude change, and these misperceptions can lend legitimacy to policies that people may not actually prefer.

Well that explains why people always think people in the past have been primitives. Like when people are surprised that Neanderthals clearly already used language, that we found hints that humanoids probably already used heat hardened wooden spears as long as 800,000 years ago, etc. In fact even apes already use stones and sticks to fight of attackers, even if they dont work on them to make them more effective.

Or like the persistent but absurd theory that people in mediveal armor had trouble to for example mount a horse on their own. When in reality, well, there are a lot of different types of mediveal armor, but in general a full set of authentic mediveal plate armor still allows you for example to somersault, even swim (not that thats easy, or a good idea, because of rust), and most certainly mount a horse. In fact a high quality set of authentic mediveal field plate armor weights around 25kg, much lighter than the equipment a modern soldier has to carry around (50kg and beyond, depending upon the respective specialization of the soldier in question).