Feigning illness to take a day off work is much less common than people think, according to the results of an international survey that suggests the public overestimates undesirable behaviour in others.
Averaging the results from the six countries polled by Ipsos Mori (the UK, US, Canada, Australia, France and Germany), the average guess was that 52% of workers in their nation have pulled a sickie in the past year, but only 23% admitted to having done so themselves.
People in the UK believe that half of the population have unjustifiably called in sick at least once in the past year, when just one in five say they did so. In fact, the average number of sick days (legitimate and illegitimate) taken has generally been in decline for a number of years.
The gap is biggest in France, where the consensus is that 40% have pretended to be ill to get a day off work, compared with the 6% that say they actually have.
Ipsos Mori also found other types of undesirable behaviour that are not as prevalent as commonly thought include eating too much sugar, not exercising enough and, in Britain at least, people not saving enough for their retirement.
The average guess by Britons for the proportion of the population that eat more than the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) daily limit of sugar (50g) is 69%, while a separate survey by Public Health England shows it is actually 47%. Ipsos Mori calculated this figure from the report’s data tables.
Across the six countries, the average guess was that 66% were eating more than 50g a day. However, only 40% thought they were exceeding the limit themselves.
However, people in every country underestimated how much exercise the wider population and, by implication, they themselves were probably doing each week.
For example, in Germany just 39% of those surveyed thought they were reaching the exercise target of walking briskly for at least 30 minutes, five times a week, or doing more vigorous exercises for 20 minutes, three times a week. When asked how many people out of 100 in Germany were meeting this target, the average guess was 37%, but according to a 2012 Lancet/WHO survey, 72% were active enough, a gap of 35 percentage points between perception and reality.
There is a similar pattern when it comes to saving in Britain. People thought 65% of the population were not putting enough money away for retirement, while 60% also believed they were not doing so themselves. However, just 43% of the UK population is categorised as an “undersaver” by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Bobby Duffy, the managing director of the Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute and global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute, said:
This survey raises an important challenge for governments and others trying to influence behaviour. The public across these countries has clearly got the message that we’re eating too much sugar, not exercising enough and not saving enough for retirement. But we now think these behaviours are much more common than they really are. We need to find a better balance between explaining the scale of an issue and not making it normal.
