PONE-D-21-21013Unobtrusive Measures of Prejudice: Estimating percentages of public beliefs and behaviours.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Jan Ketil Arnulf,

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PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Dear authors,

I would like to revise the paper by following the reviwers' comments and suggestions.

Best regards,

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This article has an interesting topic. It has tried to show that people do not have accurate information about many economic and social facts of their society. Of course, in the introduction of the article, this issue is assumed. So the question is, what was the need for this research?

Of course, in my opinion, this research is necessary because we do not know which characteristics of society are wrong. That is, people's knowledge is far from reality.

This paper in terms of statistics is not complex and the method of work done is not so complicated. The positive point is that the research procedure is clearly described.

I recommend the following tips to improve the quality of the article:

1. Explain the details of the survey in more detail. How many questions were there in the questionnaire? What tools have been used to measure intelligence? Were all the questions open-answer? When was the survey conducted? How do you know if the respondents were British citizens?

2- I think the authors can discuss at the end of the article a little about their understanding of the distance between public opinion and reality and express their theoretical ideas.

3- That smarter people have more accurate information. It seems to be more controversial about this finding. PLease speculate more about this.

Reviewer #2: The goal of the study was to investigate prejudices about socio-demographic situation in Great Britain from a perspective of individual characteristics.

Here, I provide my comments:

1. I propose to rewrite an abstract: include some introduction, goal of the paper.

2. It is not clear based on what literature authors formulated their hypotheses.

3. I recommend to say about nationality of your respondents in the section "Participants". Also, it seems vague to define citizenship based on nationality... How does it cause the results?

4. I did not get how you found correlations in Table 3: could you please provide some example?

5. Page 8: "Three demographic factors (sex, age, education) and three ideological factors (religion, politics, life-after-death) were correlated with the 25 estimates. " - what is the Table for this sentence?

When you put the information about significance of the correlations: it is not clear what are the numbers in breaks (for example, "(sex: 6; age: 8; education: 0)")

6. When you found four new variables in PCA and then used them in regression you did not explain what exactly you used: accuracy of prejudices?

7. Page 11: "five factors were significant predictors of accuracy" - could you please explain this conclusion? It is not clear

+ some additional remarks:

1. page 6: "There are indeed popular books and media programmes and blogs on peoples’ misunderstanding and misuse of statistics (Harford, 2020)." - why did you put this sentence there?

2. page 7: "The measure has been used in many studies (Bertsch & Pesta, 2009)." - but you mentioned only one.

3. I recommend to put together Table 1 and Table 2.

Finally, I recommend publishing this manuscript after major revision (in case authors will be capable to answer all the questions and rearrange the manuscript).

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Ahmadreza Asgharpourmasouleh

Reviewer #2: No

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Unobtrusive Measures of Prejudice: Estimating percentages of public beliefs and behaviours.

PONE-D-21-21013R1

Dear Dr. Jan Ketil Arnulf,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Shah Md Atiqul Haq

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear authors,

The paper is accepted now.

Congratulations!!

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This version of your paper is much improved comparing to the original one. As far I see this is proper research paper for publication.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Ahmadreza Asgharpourmasouleh

Reviewer #2: No