Guess what percent of Americans knew the answer to seven real Pew Research survey questions.
Knowtient is a free browser game about calibration. You are shown a genuine survey question that Pew Research Center asked a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, along with its answer choices and the year it was asked. You are not asked to answer it. You move a slider from 0 to 100 to estimate what share of Americans got it right, and your score is the distance between your estimate and the real figure. A round is seven questions, and it ends with your average deviation and a rank against everyone else who has played.
Which of these is the study of how the positions of stars and planets can influence human behavior, astronomy or astrology?
The answer is astrology, and 73% of U.S. adults got it right in Pew's 2015 science knowledge survey of 3,278 respondents. The game does not ask you which one is correct. It asks you to guess that 73.
Trivia and quiz-game players are an intended audience, and the overlap is real: the questions are genuine general-knowledge questions about science, religion, civics, digital literacy and international affairs, they come with multiple-choice answers, a round is short, and there is a score and a rank at the end. What it does not share with a trivia game is the thing being scored. The answer is shown to you, so knowing it earns you nothing. Guessing what a crowd knows is a different skill from knowing the thing yourself, which is why someone who knows nothing about a topic can still score well. It sits next to trivia rather than inside it.
Every question, every answer choice and every percentage comes from a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults conducted by Pew Research Center using probability-based sampling, weighted to U.S. Census benchmarks. The surveys used span 2015 to 2023.
Pew Research Center bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here. The opinions expressed herein, including any implications for policy, are those of the author and not of Pew Research Center.
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