In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the extent to which other people share their beliefs and views; it is the tendency to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances". In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.

This false consensus is significant because it increases self-esteem (overconfidence effect). This bias is especially prevalent in group settings where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. The false-consensus effect is not restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority, but it still manifests as an overestimate of the extent of their belief. Additionally, when confronted with evidence that a consensus does not exist, people often assume that those who do not agree with them are defective in some way.

The false consensus effect has been widely observed and supported by empirical evidence. One recent study has shown that consensus bias may improve decisions about other people's preferences. Ross, Green and House first defined the false consensus effect in 1977 with emphasis on the relative commonness that people perceive about their own responses; however, similar projection phenomena had already caught attention in psychology. Specifically, concerns with respect to connections between individual's personal predispositions and their estimates of peers appeared in the literature for a while. For instance, Katz and Allport in 1931 illustrated that students’ estimates of the frequency of cheating by others was positively correlated to their own behavior. Later, around 1970, the same phenomena were found on political beliefs and prisoner's dilemma situation. In 2017, researchers identified a persistent egocentric bias when participants learned about other people's snack-food preferences. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the false consensus effect can also affect professional decision makers; specifically, it has been shown that even experienced marketing managers project their personal product preferences onto consumers.

Possible causes

There is no single cause for this cognitive bias; however, several underlying mechanisms have been suggested to contribute to its formation and maintenance. Previous research has suggested that cognitive and perceptional factors (motivated projection, accessibility of information, emotion, etc.) may contribute to the consensus bias, while recent studies have focused on its neural mechanisms. The bias may also result, at least in part, from non-social stimulus-reward associations.

Cognitive Mechanisms

Cognitive mechanisms, such as the availability heuristic, self-serving bias, and naïve realism have been suggested as at least partial underlying factors in the False Consensus Effect. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that people default to, in which people may incorrectly attribute the likelihood or commonness of something based on how cognitively available the concept is to them, or how quickly it comes to mind; this could contribute to the False Consensus Effect when individuals have a readily available concept, causing them to overestimate its commonality. Self-serving bias is an attribution error that describes the tendency to attribute successes and positive traits to one's own internal factors, and attribute failures or negative traits to the external environment. This can contribute to the False Consensus Effect by justifying our actions with self-serving bias, and consequently using the False Consensus Effect to reinforce that those actions were acceptable by believing our views are widely shared. Naïve realism is the idealist belief that we perceive the world accurately, and individuals who disagree with our perceptions are incorrect or biased; this contributes to the False Consensus Effect by reinforcing that people who disagree with our view are part of the minority, whereas the majority still agrees with us.

Normative Social Influence

The False Consensus Effect can be partially attributed to the innate desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment by sharing characteristics with members of a social group, within the parameters determined by the social environment; these parameters can be influenced by demographic factors, such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status, and cultural differences. The innate motivation to be liked is known as normative social influence, conceptualized by revolutionary social psychologist Solomon Asch in 1951. Normative social influence is a social and evolutionary function to share characteristics with a group, form a group identity, and benefit from the protection and resources of group membership. It can cause the False Consensus Effect by creating a social illusion - the need to be liked causes one to agree with others outwardly even if they disagree internally, creating a social illusion of collective agreement. Additionally, the False Consensus Effect is fundamentally a perceptual effect; normative social influence motivates individuals to agree with each other, potentially leading some to believe that everyone getting along socially means that everyone agrees. Normative social influence also leads to people feeling validated in their beliefs when they are not challenged, reinforcing the illusion of correctness and group cohesion.

Informational Social Influence

Another type of social pressure to conform is informational social influence, also coined by Asch, that may contribute to the False Consensus Effect. This describes individuals' tendency to conform to a majority consensus out of the need to be correct; additionally, Asch posited that informational social influence is partially caused by people learning how to act within socially determined guidelines by perceiving others' behavior, allowing them to fall into the cohesive group identity. Maintenance of the False Consensus Effect may be related to the tendency to make decisions with relatively little information. When faced with uncertainty and a limited sample from which to make decisions, people often "project" themselves onto the situation. When this personal knowledge is used as input to make generalizations, it often results in the false sense of being part of the majority.

Major theoretical approaches

The false-consensus effect can be traced back to two parallel theories of social perception, "the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people". The first is the idea of social comparison. The principal claim of Leon Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory was that individuals evaluate their thoughts and attitudes based on other people. This may be motivated by a desire for confirmation and the need to feel good about oneself. Informational social influence can be viewed as an extension of this theory, where people may use others as sources of information to define social reality and guide behavior. This is called informational social influence. The problem, though, is that people are often unable to accurately perceive the social norm and the actual attitudes of others. In other words, research has shown that people are surprisingly poor "intuitive psychologists" and that our social judgments are often inaccurate. This finding helped to lay the groundwork for an understanding of biased processing and inaccurate social perception. The false-consensus effect is just one example of such an inaccuracy.

The second influential theory is projection, the idea that people project their own attitudes and beliefs onto others. This idea of projection is not a new concept. In fact, it can be found in Sigmund Freud's work on the defense mechanism of projection, D.S. Holmes' work on "attributive projection" (1968), and Gustav Ichheiser's work on social perception (1970). D.S. Holmes, for example, described social projection as the process by which people "attempt to validate their beliefs by projecting their own characteristics onto other individuals". In religious psychology, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) posited the Projection or Reflection theory of religion, in that human perceptions of the divine are projections of our own ideal qualities in order to conceptualize our aspirations.

Here, a connection can be made between the two stated theories of social comparison and projection. First, as social comparison theory explains, individuals constantly look to peers as a reference group and are motivated to do so in order to seek confirmation for their own attitudes and beliefs.

The false-consensus effect, as defined by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, came to be the culmination of the many related theories that preceded it. In their well-known series of four studies, Ross and associates hypothesized and then demonstrated that people tend to overestimate the popularity of their own beliefs and preferences. Studies were both conducted in hypothetical situations by questionnaire surveys and in authentic conflict situations. For questionnaire studies, participants were presented with hypothetical events and then were not only asked to indicate their own behavioral choices and characteristics under the provided circumstances, but also asked to rate the responses and traits of their peers who referred as "actors". As for real occasion studies, participants were actually confronted with the conflict situations in which they were asked to choose behavioral alternatives and to judge the traits as well as decisions of two supposedly true individuals who had attended in the study. In general, the raters made more "extreme predictions" about the personalities of the actors that did not share the raters' own preference. In fact, the raters may have even thought that there was something wrong with the people expressing the alternative response. One particularly well-studied cultural difference is the manner in which individuals construct and understand their sense of self, or self-concept. People in collectivistic cultures are found to have more interdependent self-concepts, in which the self is understood through relationships with close others. By contrast, people in individualistic cultures are found to have more independent self-concepts, in which the self is understood through personal characteristics that distinguish the self from others. Differences in individualism and collectivism, and more specifically self-concept, suggest differences in perceptions and social motivations that researchers theorize affect the influence of the false consensus effect.

Choi & Cha (2019) find differences in the strength of the false consensus effect based on domain. In studying Koreans and European Americans, they find that false consensus effects are stronger in Koreans regarding political beliefs, personal problems, and behavioural choices, but not personal traits and values. They suggest that these findings are a result of differences in individualism and collectivism, as they influence attribution and motivation. As collectivism places greater emphasis on situational factors, researchers posit that individuals from such cultures will assume situational factors are dictating behaviour more so than those from individualistic cultures, who are more likely to attribute behaviour to disposition. Thus, it is suggested that Koreans perceive greater similarity in domains with increased potential for social influence, as individuals perceive others as being similarly influenced by the situation. Further, it is suggested that in these same domains European Americans perceive less similarity as they view behaviours and opinions as resulting from an individual's personal characteristics. Additionally, they suggest that differences in perceived similarity across domains may be influenced by differences in consistency. Prior cross-cultural research finds that independence is motivated by self-consistency across contexts, while interdependence is motivated by consistency within social roles. The researchers thus posit that European Americans perceive similarity in personal traits and values, as they view these domains as more consistent. Further, they suggest that Koreans perceive greater similarity in domains that implicate others, as they understand consistency through social roles and relationships.

Similar research by Ott-Holland et al. (2014) finds evidence of greater false consensus in collectivistic cultures. Specifically, they look at institutional collectivism, in which action for collective purpose and benefit is valued over individual action. They find that people from countries high in institutional collectivism perceive more similarity between themselves and others than those from countries high in individualism. Researches posit that emphasis on collective action motivates perceptions of similarity. However, this effect was small and a limited number of countries were studied.

Overall, the existing empirical work provides evidence of notable cross-cultural differences in the false consensus effect. It generally appears that in certain contexts, false consensus is stronger in collectivistic cultures. Though, this facet of cross-cultural research is still developing, and the work thus far has been limited to specific collectivistic societies that cannot be generalized to all contexts.

See also

  • Abilene paradox
  • Social comparison bias
  • Value (ethics)

References

Notes

Sources

Further reading

  • Changing minds: the false consensus effect
  • Overcoming Bias: Mind Projection Fallacy