False Consensus Effect: What Is It And What Does It Reveal About Us?
In this world we are many people and each of us thinks differently. In the same way that no two people are alike, there are no two minds alike, but they are relatively similar in terms of beliefs, predilections, and so on.
However, sometimes, we think that there are more people who think the same as us than who really are. This is basically what has been called false consensus effect which we will address in more depth below.
The false consensus effect is a cognitive bias, which consists of a tendency to think that there are many people who have opinions 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 one’s beliefs, predilections and habits are also shared or carried out by other people. In this way, by thinking that you are not the only one who thinks or acts in a certain way, you maximize your self-confidence.
This phenomenon is not pathological nor does it represent a real problem in itself. Everyone wants to think that their way of being is not ‘weird’ or ‘wrong’. What could be considered problematic about the effect is thinking that there are many more people who think in a certain way, thinking that there is a more than extensive 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 specific definition, the Austrian psychoanalyst did propose, at the beginning of the last century, some hypotheses that could explain why people ‘find’ support, greater than it really is, for their opinions and way of being. According to, 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 the delimitation of this concept was carried out, in addition to being addressed in research. Researchers Lee Ross, David Greene and Pamela House carried out a study in 1977 in which they asked university students to answer two questions:
First, students were asked if they would agree to carry a hanging sign, which said ‘repent,’ 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 believed had answered the same as them, that is, that they had said that they would carry or not, depending on the case, the aforementioned poster.
Both the students who had said they were not going to take it and those who were willing to do so tended to overestimate the number of people who would do the same thing they had said In the case of the students who had agreed to carry the sign, on average they estimated that 60% of students would also agree to do so. In the group of students who had refused to wear it, they said that only 27% of the students would dare to wear that sign.
Why does this cognitive bias occur?
There are several hypotheses that 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.
Firstly, it has been suggested that spending time with people who actually think in a similar way or share many points in common with oneself can reinforce the mistaken idea that there are many people who also think the same. It should also be said 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 previously 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 you are right is to find support, even if overestimated, in the other individuals who make up the complex society in which we live.
Finding a social circle in which people have the same opinion or share the same visions about reality is a way to protect the delicate emotional balance in addition to reinforcing social relationships 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, regarding the real support that one’s opinions have. The normal thing is that when having certain beliefs, the individual looks for opinions that continue along the same line, ignoring those that can refute or demonstrate how much support they really have (motivated reasoning).
Does everyone show it?
Although, as we were already commenting previously, the effect of false consensus is not something out of this world, given that everyone wants to find great support, even if they do not really have it, it is worth saying that, sometimes, not all people express it. . This is where the absence of this effect can be related to the presence of psychopathology, or a pattern of thinking that could end up being pathological.
Tabachnik’s group discovered, in 1983, that certain people did not have this tendency to exaggerate support in others. In fact, It seemed that they believed that no one supported them, or that their ideas were completely removed from the line of thought of the majority of people
Tabachnik conducted a study whose sample was made up 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 those same attributes were perceived by others.
The results showed that subjects with depression judged their attributes differently compared to those who did not have the diagnosis. This can be related to the presence of biases present in mood disorders that go in the opposite direction to the effect of the false consensus described here.
Real Life Examples of the False Consensus Effect
One of the clearest examples in which this phenomenon can be found is in the sports field. 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 in which they live, regardless of the statistics or how full the stadiums are when the game is played.
It is also possible to see it in politics. It is often thought that one’s own ideology or, at least, some points that make it up, are widely supported for 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 the majority of his followers think the same as him.
To conclude the article, we are going to mention a case of this real effect that has been related to the economic crisis that emerged 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 markets would evolve in the years to come.
They said this thinking that other investors would take the same actions in the markets, that is, they believed in a false consensus. Due to this situation, the markets evolved in an unexpected way, ending in the economic disaster that we all know.
