Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective or to have a higher opinion of oneself than reality. Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly first identified this cognitive bias in their 1979 paper, "Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution". People are more inclined to be aware of their own behaviors since they can use their thoughts and emotions to gain more information about themselves. These thoughts and emotions can affect how people view themselves in relation to others in specific situations. A common example arises when people are asked to explain how much credit should be given to each person in a collaborative project. Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard University, considers egocentric bias as one of the "seven sins" of memory and essentially reflects the prominent role played by the self when encoding and retrieving episodic memories. As such, people often feel that their contributions to a collaborative project are greater than those of other members, since people tend to focus more on how much they have done.

Causes

The causes and motivations for egocentric bias were investigated in a 1983 journal entry by Brian Mullen of Murray State University. Inspired by the study by Ross et al. demonstrating the false consensus effect, Mullen's paper focused on the overestimation of consensus. Mullen analyzed the NBC television show "Play the Percentages" to determine whether egocentric bias was rooted in a perceptual and unintentional distortion of reality versus a conscious, intentional motivation to appear normalized. Subjects in this analysis were contestants from the show, 20–30 year old middle class married couple with equal gender distribution. At the start of each show, studio audiences were asked several trivia questions, and the percentage of correct answers was recorded for later use in the game. During each round of the game, opposing contestants estimated the percentage of correct answers. The contestant who had a closer estimate wins the percentage of correct answer as a score, and then if they answer said trivia question correctly, wins the remaining percentage for a maximum possible 100 points. The first couple to win 300 points received a cash prize, with the opportunity to win more prizes in bonus rounds. Thus, the show provided incentive for unbiased estimates of consensus. Statistical analysis of the collected data showed that the "egocentric bias of false consensus was observed in spite of the potent incentive for unbiased estimates of consensus." This analysis ultimately supports the hypothesis that egocentric bias is a result of unintentional perceptual distortion of reality rather than a conscious, intentional motivation to appear normalized. Moreover, egocentric bias may have evolved from hunter-gatherer times, in which communities were small and interdependent enough that individuals could assume that others around them had very similar outlooks. An egocentric view would have reduced cognitive load and increased communication efficiency.

Effects of personal characteristics

Age

A 2016 study published by Riva, Triscoli, Lamm, Carnaghi, and Silani found that egocentric bias tends to be experienced in a much greater degree by adolescents and older adults than by young and middle aged adults. They examined the emotional effect of visuo-tactile stimulation on pairs of participants from a population of 114 female of varying ages. The varying degree of egocentric bias with age was attributed to the developmental cycle of the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) of the parietal lobe, which finishes developing at the end of adolescence and decays early.

Bilingualism

Recent studies of egocentric bias have been done in many different subgroups of people, such as bilingual people. A study done by Paula Rubio-Fernández and Sam Glucksberg found that bilingual people are less prone to egocentric bias because they have grown to pay more attention to others' thoughts. Thus, it is less difficult for them to differentiate between their own opinions and those of others.

False-consensus effect

Considered to be a facet of egocentric bias, the false-consensus effect states that people believe their thoughts, actions, and opinions are much more common than they are in reality.

A well known example of false-consensus effect is a study published by Ross, Greene and House in 1977.

Both concepts may be the product of individualistic cultures that usually stress independence and personal achievement over group-oriented success. Cross-cultural studies have found a strong presence of the egocentric bias in the primarily individualistic American, South African, and Yugoslavian communities, but noted the opposite effect in the collectivistic Japanese, Nepali, and Indian societies. People from these cultures tend to demonstrate a bias toward modesty, in which success is attributed to external or group-related factors and failures are seen as the result of personal shortcomings. In Bayesian updating, people use prior probabilities to make estimates, and then gradually change these probabilities as they gain more information. Bayesian inference is often used by psychologists to determine whether subjects who exhibit the false-consensus effect have a rational thought process. To understand Bayes' rule, consider an example from an experiment by Kreuger and Clement: there is an urn with 100 chips, some blue and some red, and then subjects are told that the first chip drawn from the urn is blue. Subjects are asked to estimate the probability that the urn contains predominantly blue chips. Using Bayes' rule, the probability that a blue chip is drawn given that the urn contains predominantly blue chips is equal to the probability of the urn being predominantly blue multiplied by the probability of the urn being predominantly blue given that a blue chip was drawn, all divided by the probability that the urn is predominantly blue. Most participants overestimated the requested probability. Data shows that subjects tend not to pay attention to sample size when making probability predictions. For example, although it has statistically been proven by the law of large numbers that larger samples have less variability, people tend to claim that large and small samples have the same amount of variability. Studies like the urn experiment above provide evidence that the false-consensus effect is not entirely rational, and that egocentric viewpoints tend to be predominant.

Real-world implications

Collaboration

Egocentric bias can lead to the devaluation of peer contributions and the amplification of one's own work when in a collaborative setting. For example, when group members have been asked to report what percentage of the output they created, the total summed to greater than 100%. Usually, individuals are more easily able to recall their personal contributions and thus believe them to greater or more important. This applies to both positive and negative inputs: in a study of married couples, each spouse rated themselves as more responsible for helpful (cleaning) and detractive activities (causing arguments). Research has shown that feelings of sibling caregivers and their siblings depend on the contact between siblings and their feelings of closeness. Each of these two groups believed that their siblings contributed less to the needs of their family than themselves, and were more resistant to increasing these types of contributions. The closer that siblings were to each other, measured through observation and self reports, the smaller the extent of egocentric bias they felt in reporting each sibling's contribution.

Mental health

An overly exaggerated or extremely low demonstration of egocentric bias could be an indicator of mental illness. Those with anxiety tend to view themselves as the center of all events around them, regardless of their nature or how unrelated they are to oneself. On the other hand, people suffering from depression may have a lower tendency towards egocentricity, as evidenced by the fact that they tend to more realistically rate their contributions to group work, while non-depressed participants often overreport their additions. Moreover, citizens demonstrate egocentric bias, in conjunction with the false-consensus effect, in their predictions of election outcomes. A study examining the 2008 American presidential election found that the more strongly people favor a certain candidate, the higher they estimate that candidate's likelihood of winning the election. For instance, those who strongly preferred Barack Obama predicted that he had a 65% chance of becoming the president, while those who preferred another candidate approximated that he only had a 40% chance of victory.

Citations

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General and cited references

Further reading

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