Trump and the Jerk Pride Movement

Donald Trump, the gift that keeps on giving.

When David Letterman, the former host of the Late Night Show, heard that Donald Trump decided to enter the presidential race he moaned that he had retired too early.

Trump has truly been an inspiration for pundits to sharpen their wit.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, co author of "The Frontier in American Culture", called Trump the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement”  (www.denverpost.com/2015/12/18/limerick-jerk-studies-101/).

Her research, dating back many years established that the consensus of people who dealt with the public (waiters, hotel clerks, cab drivers, etc) was that 15% of the public were jerks.

Quoting from the article,

Trump should be understood as the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement,” in which the Fifteen Percent stride vigorously out of the closet and present themselves to the world, shouting out wildly over-generalized, destructive, and polarizing sentiments and then, still shouting, congratulating themselves for their impressive forthrightness.

Because Limerick claims that her “research” showed the percentage of jerks in the population is 15% she was surprised that a cab driver put the number at only 5%.   Five percent,” he repeated. “But they move around a lot.”

Thinking this could be the basis of a serious question in a research methods class (sociology, psychology, marketing, analytics, etc.)  I forwarded the information to several profs in those areas.

Yes, it’s part of a joke, but assuming that the cab driver were correct, that the true number is 5%, what other error other than exceptionally poor math skills, double counting, or really poor sampling technique would explain the discrepancy?