Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

false-consensus effect: a standalone construct

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false-consensuseffect1 CONSTRUCTFalse consensusROSS · FALSE CONSENSUS

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Social psychology

Overestimating how widely others share one's own views and choices

Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House introduced the false-consensus effect in 1977 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, defining it as the tendency for people to overestimate how many others share their own opinions, preferences, and behaviors, so that they treat their own choices as relatively common and appropriate while seeing alternative responses as less typical. In one of their studies students were asked whether they would walk around campus wearing a large sandwich-board sign, and those who agreed judged agreement to be the majority choice while those who refused judged refusal to be the majority, each group projecting its own decision onto everyone else. Brian Mullen and colleagues confirmed the pattern across a 1985 meta-analysis of 115 hypothesis tests, and Gary Marks and Norman Miller's 1987 review consolidated a decade of work and linked the effect to mechanisms such as spending time with similar others and the ease of calling one's own position to mind. The construct is distinctive as an egocentric bias in social perception: it names a measurable error in estimating a consensus, the gap between how common a person believes their own view or behavior to be and how common it actually is, rather than a bias in judging any single other individual.[1][2][3]

Unit
The discrepancy between a person's estimate of how prevalent their own view or behavior is and its actual prevalence, compared across people who hold different positions
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified by asking people to estimate the percentage of others who share their own response, then comparing the estimates given by those who endorse a position with the estimates given by those who reject it, or against a known base rate

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Nearby constructs

projection4 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsattribution3 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsconfirmation bias1 fields · 2 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-x
  2. Mullen, B., Atkins, J. L., Champion, D. S., Edwards, C., Hardy, D., Story, J. E., & Vanderklok, M. (1985). The false consensus effect: A meta-analysis of 115 hypothesis tests. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21(3), 262–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(85)90020-4
  3. Marks, G., & Miller, N. (1987). Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: An empirical and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 102(1), 72–90. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.102.1.72

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