A. 78
B. 82
C. 86
Correct answer
The life expectancy of a baby born in Europe in 2016 is 77.5 years. Turkmenistan has the lowest life expectancy at birth, at 68.2 years, while Spain the highest at 83.3 years.
82 would be the correct answer for countries like Luxembourg, Iceland, Austria, and Israel, but at the moment not a single country in Europe has a life expectancy at birth of 86 years. However, when it comes to living long lives, women by far outdo men. On average, women in France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland actually do live to 86.
Data source
The evidence for the correct answer comes from the World Health Organization: https://gapm.io/xwhol
Lives in Eastern Europe are shorter than Western Europeans think
Our human respondents didn’t do quite so badly on this question, but they still scored worse than random: 30% managed to answer correctly. Germany had the lowest score for this question at 25% correct answers. France came in second with 32%, while only the United Kingdom managed to match the chimps with 33% of respondents answering correctly.
Why do people pick the wrong answer?
Because they think that what they see in their country is true for all of Europe… Life expectancy has been on a nearly continuous upward path since the late 19th Century—a fact that most people in Europe are aware of. And because they know it has been rising for so long — and that it continues to rise — it’s easy to assume that the highest number must be correct.
It is also possible that people in France, Germany, and the UK believe that life expectancy in Europe as a whole is closer to the number for their own countries. Life expectancy at birth in Germany and in the United Kingdom is 81 years, while in France it’s 83 years. However, the overall figure is brought down by lower life expectancies in a number of Eastern European countries.
