"Public misperception" refers to a situation where people have a mistaken or incorrect understanding of something that is widely known or believed by others. Full definition
Election post-mortems should not reinforce public misperceptions about Labour's record. (theguardian.com)
There is ample evidence for an association between public misperceptions of climate science and people's preferred news outlets (Ramsay et al., 2010); people who preferentially get their news from Fox are most likely to be incorrectly informed about the state of climate science and in particular the consensus among climate scientists. (shapingtomorrowsworld.org)
A common public misperception is that these bureaus are government agencies or extensions of the federal government. (ovationcredit.com)