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=                       False_consensus_effect                       =
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                            Introduction
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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
instances, Katz and Allport in 1931 illustrated that students’
estimates of the amount of others on the frequency of cheating was
positively correlated to their own behavior. Later, around 1970, 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
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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 bias; 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
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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
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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.

In the ten years after the influential Ross et al. study, close to 50
papers were published with data on the false-consensus effect.
Theoretical approaches were also expanded. The theoretical
perspectives of this era can be divided into four categories: (a)
selective exposure and cognitive availability, (b) salience and focus
of attention, (c) logical information processing, and (d) motivational
processes. In general, the researchers and designers of these theories
believe that there is not a single right answer. Instead, they admit
that there is overlap among the theories and that the false-consensus
effect is most likely due to a combination of these factors.


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.

did a popular study on the effects of the false-consensus effect
among a specific adolescent community in an effort to determine
whether students show a higher level of false-consensus effect among
their direct peers as opposed to society at large. The participants of
this experiment were 203 college students ranging in age from 18 to 25
(with an average age of 18.5). The participants were given a
questionnaire and asked to answer questions regarding a variety of
social topics. For each social topic, they were asked to answer how
they felt about the topic and to estimate the percentage of their
peers who would agree with them. The results determined that the
false-consensus effect was extremely prevalent when participants were
describing the rest of their college community; out of twenty topics
considered, sixteen of them prominently demonstrated the
false-consensus effect. The high levels of false-consensus effect seen
in this study can be attributed to the group studied; because the
participants were asked to compare themselves to a group of peers that
they are constantly around (and view as very similar to themselves),
the levels of false-consensus effect increased.


Salience and focus of attention
=================================
This theory suggests that when an individual focuses solely on their
own preferred position, they are more likely to overestimate its
popularity, thus falling victim to the false-consensus effect. 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.
In a study done by Fox, Yinon, and Mayraz, researchers were attempting
to determine whether or not the levels of the false-consensus effect
changed in different age groups. In order to come to a conclusion, it
was necessary for the researchers to split their participants into
four different age groups. Two hundred participants were used, and
gender was not considered to be a factor. Just as in the previous
study mentioned, this study used a questionnaire as its main source of
information. The results showed that the false-consensus effect was
extremely prevalent in all groups, but was the most prevalent in the
oldest age group (the participants who were labeled as "old-age home
residents"). They showed the false-consensus effect in all 12 areas
that they were questioned about. The increase in false-consensus
effect seen in the oldest age group can be accredited to their high
level of "logical" reasoning behind their decisions; the oldest age
group has obviously lived the longest, and therefore feels that they
can project their beliefs onto all age groups due to their (seemingly
objective) past experiences and wisdom. The younger age groups cannot
logically relate to those older to them because they have not had that
experience and do not pretend to know these objective truths. These
results demonstrate a tendency for older people to rely more heavily
on situational attributions (life experience) as opposed to internal
attributions.


Motivational processes
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This theory stresses the benefits of the false-consensus effect:
namely, the perception of increased social validation, social support,
and self-esteem. It may also be useful to exaggerate similarities in
social situations in order to increase liking.


                    Belief in a favorable future
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The concept of false consensus effect can also be extended to
predictions about future others. Belief in a favorable future is the
belief that future others will change their preferences and beliefs in
alignment with one's own.

Rogers, Moore, and Norton (2017) find that belief in a favorable
future is greater in magnitude than the false-consensus effect for two
reasons:
# It is based in future others whose beliefs are not directly
observable, and
# It is focused on future beliefs, which gives these future others
time to "discover" the truth and change their beliefs.


                    Cross-cultural perspectives
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In more recent years, researchers have taken to exploring potential
differences in how the false consensus effect manifests across
cultures. While there is still a notable gap in cross-cultural
literature, growing empirical evidence posits differences in the
strength and prevalence of the false consensus effect contingent on
cultural context.

Broadly, research has found differences in the false consensus effect
on the bases of individualism and collectivism. Individualistic
cultures encourage distinguishing the self from others and expressing
unique characteristics, while collectivistic cultures value group
harmony and cohesion. One particularly well-studied difference between
individualistic and collectivistic cultures is the way in which
individuals consist of 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; whereas 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 for 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 will assume situational
factors are dictating behaviour more so than people from
individualistic cultures who are 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. By contrast, 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 views 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 people from
individualistic countries. 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 generalize to all contexts.


                              See also
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* Abilene paradox
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* Social comparison bias
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* Value (ethics)


                           External links
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* [http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/false_consensus.htm
Changing minds: the false consensus effect]
* [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/mind-projection.html
Overcoming Bias: Mind Projection Fallacy]


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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect