In psychology, the false-consensus effect or false-consensus bias is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate how many people agree with him or her. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are 'normal' and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a 'false consensus'. This false consensus is significant because it increases self-esteem. The need to be "normal" and fit in with other people is underlined by a desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment.
Within the realm of personality psychology, the false-consensus effect does not have significant effects. This is because the false-consensus effect relies heavily on the social environment and how a person interprets this environment. Instead of looking at situational attributions, personality psychology evaluates a person with dis positional attributions, making the false-consensus effect relatively irrelevant in that domain. Therefore, a person's personality potentially could affect the degree that the person relies on false-consensus effect, but not the existence of such a trait.
The false-consensus effect is not necessarily restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority. The false-consensus effect is also evidenced when people overestimate the extent of their particular belief is correlated with the belief of others. Thus, fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that the majority of people share their views, but their estimates of the number of people who share their point of view will tend to exceed the actual number.
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.
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 can be contrasted with pluralistic ignorance, an error in which people privately disapprove but publicly support what seems to be the majority view (regarding a norm or belief), when the majority in fact shares their (private) disapproval. While the false consensus effect leads people to wrongly believe that they agree with the majority (when the majority, in fact, openly disagrees with them), the pluralistic ignorance effect leads people to wrongly believe that they disagree with the majority (when the majority, in fact, covertly agrees with them). Pluralistic ignorance might, for example, lead a student to engage in binge drinking because of the mistaken belief that most other students approve of it, while in reality most other students disapprove, but behave in the same way because they share the same mistaken (but collectively self-sustaining) belief. In a parallel example of false consensus, a student who likes binge drinking would believe that a majority also likes it, while in reality, most others dislike it and openly say so.
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. As an extension of this theory, 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 (1956), for example, described social projection as the process by which people "attempt to validate their beliefs by projecting their own characteristics onto other individuals".
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. In order to guarantee confirmation and a higher self-esteem, though, an individual might unconsciously project their own beliefs onto the others (the targets of their comparisons). This final outcome is the false-consensus effect. To summarize, the false-consensus effect can be seen as stemming from both social comparison theory and the concept of projection.
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. In each of the studies, subjects or "raters" were asked to choose one of a few mutually-exclusive responses. They would then predict the popularity of each of their choices among other participants, referred to as "actors." To take this a step further, Ross and associates also proposed and tested a related bias in social inferences: they found that raters in an experiment estimated their own response to be not only common, but also not very revealing of the actors' "distinguishing personal dispositions". On the other hand, alternative or opposite responses were perceived as much more revealing of the actors as people. 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.
Selective exposure and cognitive availability
This theory is closely tied to the availability heuristic, which suggests that perceptions of similarity (or difference) are affected by how easily those characteristics can be recalled from memory. And as one might expect, similarities between oneself and others are more easily recalled than differences. This is in part because people usually associate with those who are similar to themselves. This selected exposure to similar people may bias or restrict the "sample of information about the true diversity of opinion in the larger social environment". As a result of the selective exposure and availability heuristic, it is natural for the similarities to prevail in one's thoughts.
Salience and focus of attention
This theory suggests that when an individual focuses solely on their own preferred position, they are more likely to fall victim to the false-consensus effect and overestimate its popularity. This is because that position is the only one in their immediate consciousness. Performing an action that promotes the position will make it more salient and may increase the false-consensus effect. If, however, more positions are presented to the individual, the degree of the false-consensus effect might decrease significantly
Logical information processing
This theory assumes that active and seemingly rational thinking underlies an individual’s estimates of similarity among others. This is manifested in one’s causal attributions. For instance, if an individual makes an external attribution for their belief, the individual will likely view his or her experience of the thing in question as merely a matter of objective experience. For example, a few movie-goers may falsely assume that the quality of the film is a purely objective entity. To explain their dissatisfaction with it, the viewers may say that it was simply a bad movie (an external attribution). Based on this (perhaps erroneous) assumption of objectivity, it seems rational or "logical" to assume that everyone else will have the same experience; consensus should be high. On the other hand, someone in the same situation who makes an internal attribution (perhaps a film aficionado who is well-aware of his or her especially high standards) will realize the subjectivity of the experience and will be drawn to the opposite conclusion; consensus will be much lower. Though they result in two opposite outcomes, both paths of attribution rely on an initial assumption which then leads to a "logical" conclusion. By this logic, then, it can be said that the false-consensus effect is really a reflection of the fundamental attribution error (specifically the actor-observer bias) in which people prefer situational/external attributions over internal/dispositional ones to justify their own behaviors.
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