A worldwide survey conducted by YouGov polled 34 countries, accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population, asking pollsters to rank which men and women they admire the most.
Naturally there were some familiar names among the ranks, Bill Gates coming in at #1 for the guys, but Angelina Jolie received a high overall score than Bill and was ranked #1 for women.
What was shocking though is how across the board we’d see some of the same names over and over and over…and why the hell does the world love Jackie Chan so much? Seriously, you scroll through these rankings and you keep seeing Jackie’s name over and over and over, and it makes NO SENSE.
How is Jackie Chan more admired than Warren Buffett or Stephen Hawking? Was it simply the number of Chinese votes skewing the polls? Or do people really love the geriatric former action star that much?
Jackie Chan even made the top 15 in the USA, wtf?!?!???
I don’t know why I find it hilarious that America’s Sweetheart, Julia Roberts, would make the list in Great Britain but not in the USA. Either way let’s keep moving on….
…who?
Wow, they really LOVE Edward Snowden outside of the good ol’ U.S. of A….huh?
The methodology from YouGov may shed a little light on how Jackie Chan repeatedly made the ‘Most Admired’ list globally:
In December YouGov gathered open-ended nominations from panellists across 34 countries, asking them simply: “Thinking about people alive in the world today, which [man or woman] do you most admire?” These nominations were then used to compile a list of the 25 men and 25 women who received the most nominations and were nominated in at least 2 countries. An additional 5 popular local figures were added to the lists for individual countries.
In January, 23 of the 34 countries were polled again in representative* surveys, where respondents were asked two questions: “who do you truly admire?”, where they could make multiple selections, and “who do you MOST admire?”, where they could pick only one. These two numbers were then combined into the score (displayed to the right of each name above.)
By asking respondents those two questions, we can understand both the breadth (i.e. global reach) and the intensity of a person’s support, which we regard as both important measures.
So he’s really only top 15 out of 25, and Jackie Chan isn’t all that awesome after all? But then how do you explain him being in the top 5 several times? What the hell is going on?!
For the full breakdown of countries you can head on over to YouGov by clicking HERE.