False consensus effect: what is it and what does it reveal about us?

This cognitive bias leads us to think that our way of thinking is more popular than it is.

In this world we are many people and each of us thinks differently. Just as no two people are alike, no two minds are alike, but relatively similar in terms of beliefs, predilections and so on.

Sometimes, however, we think that there are more people who think the same as we do than there really are. This is, basically, what has been called the false consensus effectwhich we will discuss in more detail below.

What is the false consensus effect?

The false-consensus effect is a cognitive bias, which consists of a tendency to think that there are many people who think or think in a similar way to oneself.. That is, it consists of overestimating the degree of agreement that others have with the same ideas, attitudes or behaviors.

People want to feel supported, for this reason it is common to assume that their own beliefs, predilections and habits are also shared or carried out by other people. Thus, by thinking that one is not the only one who thinks or acts in a certain way, self-confidence is maximized.

This phenomenon is not pathological, nor is it a real problem in itself. Everyone wants to think that their way of being is not 'weird' or 'wrong'. What could be seen as problematic is the effect of thinking that there are many more people who think in a certain way, thinking that there is more than a broad consensus.

History of the phenomenon and research

Although it was not Sigmund Freud who gave it the name 'false consensus effect', nor did he give it a concrete definition, the Austrian psychoanalyst did put forward, at the beginning of the last century, some hypotheses that could explain why people 'find' a greater support, than it really is, for their opinions and way of being. According to him this phenomenon was a defense mechanism known as projection.that is, attributing to others, for better or worse, one's own ideas and feelings.

However, it was in the 70's when this concept was delimited and addressed in research. In 1977, researchers Lee Ross, David Greene and Pamela House conducted a study in which they asked university students to answer two questions:

First, students were asked if they would agree to wear a 'repent' sign and walk around campus with it. Some of these students agreed to wear it, others preferred not to wear it. After this, they were asked to estimate how many people they thought had answered the same as they had, i.e., that they had said they would or would not, as the case may be, wear the sign.

Both the students who had said they would not wear it and those who were willing to wear it tended to overestimate the number of people who would wear it. tended to overestimate the number of people who would do the same as they had said.. In the case of the students who had agreed to wear the sign, on average they estimated that 60% of students would also agree to wear the sign. In the group of students who had refused to wear the sign, they said that only 27% of students would dare to wear the sign.

Why does this cognitive bias occur?

Several hypotheses have tried to explain why people overestimate the support that their opinions and other aspects of their mind and behavior have in society as a whole.

First, it has been suggested that spending time with people who actually think alike or share many commonalities with oneself may reinforce the misconception that there are many people who also think alike. It is also worth saying that thinking that we are not the only ones who think this way is a key factor in building and maintaining self-esteem..

Another approach, related to what has been discussed above about Freudian projection, is that the false consensus effect arises as a defense mechanism. It is a spontaneous and automated behavior that seeks to protect self-confidence. Nobody wants to be the one who is wrong, and one of the best ways to 'confirm' that one is right is to find support, albeit overestimated, in the other individuals who make up the complex society in which we live.

Seeking a social circle in which people have the same opinion or share the same visions of reality is a way to protect the delicate balance of the delicate balance of our delicate balance. a way to protect the delicate emotional balanceand to reinforce social relations with the peer group.

It should be said that another aspect that is of vital importance in the appearance of this phenomenon is that there is a lack of information, not necessarily bad, as to the real support that one's own opinions have. It is normal that when having certain beliefs, the individual seeks opinions that follow the same line, ignoring those that can refute or demonstrate how much support he or she really has (motivated reasoning).

Does everyone manifest it?

Although, as we were saying before, the false consensus effect is not a big deal, given that everyone wants to find great support, even if they do not really have it, it must be said that, sometimes, not all people manifest it. This is where the absence of this effect can be linked to the presence of psychopathology, or a pattern of thinking that could end up being pathological.

Tabachnik's group found, in 1983, that certain people did not have this tendency to exaggerate support for others. In fact, they seemed to believe that no one supported them, or that their ideas were completely out of line with most people's line of thinking..

Tabachnik conducted a study whose sample consisted of people who had been diagnosed with depression and others who did not have the disorder. These people were asked to judge a series of attributes about themselves and also how others perceived those same attributes.

The results showed that subjects with depression judged their attributes differently compared to those without the diagnosis. This may be related to the presence of biases present in mood disorders, which run counter to the that run counter to the false consensus effect described here.

Real-life examples of the false-consensus effect

One of the clearest examples where this phenomenon can be found is in sports. Many people have a favorite soccer team and it is very common for all of them to believe that their team is the most popular in the neighborhood, city or region where they live, regardless of statistics or how full the stadiums are when the game is played.

It is also possible to see this in politics. It is common to think that one's own ideology, or at least some of the points that make it up, are widely supported by the rest of the population as a whole. by the rest of the citizenry as a whole. This is especially visible when a highly politicized person has a profile on a social network and sees that most of his followers think the same way he does.

To conclude this article, we will mention a case of this real effect that has been related to the economic crisis that arose in 2008. It is thought that one of the determining factors in the economic destabilization in the markets was that that year many investors made inaccurate predictions of how the markets would evolve in the coming years.

They said this thinking that other investors would take the same actions in the markets, i.e. they believed in a false consensus. Because of this situation, the markets evolved in a way that was not expected, ending in the economic disaster we all know.

Bibliographical references:

• Polaino-Lorente, A., & Villamisar, D. A. G. (1984). Experimental analysis of the motivational and cognitive deficits of ((Learned Helplessness)) in a sample of non-depressive adolescents. Psychology Notebooks, 11, 7-34.
• 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, 279-301.
• Tabachnik, N., Crocker, J., & Alloy, L. B. (1983). Depression, social comparison, and the false-consensus effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 688–699. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.688