You’re in your mid-Monday meeting. You and your team have been running up against this problem for a week. Now, it’s problem solving time. “There are no wrong answers” you remember someone saying as you begin. Yeah right—they always say that. You hear the usual solutions put forward. They’ll work, but they’ll take quite a bit of time, energy, and resources to pull off. You have some ideas in your head, some that are little crazy but you think they’ll get the job done better than the other options on the table. It seems like a slam dunk. But instead, you stay quiet. Surely, if it was such an elegant solution someone else must have already thought of and dismissed it by now—you don’t want to look like an idiot, especially since we have something that works already. But it seems so obvious you can’t help but wonder, “is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?”
You might have experienced what psychologists call the False Consensus Effect before. If you think you haven’t, think again. Indeed, that’s basically the point. The basic idea is that people tend to think that their own opinions, beliefs, and behaviors are more common than they actually are (Ross, Greene, & House 1977). In other words, we tend to think that we are fairly normal and not deviant. This is not to say that we always think we are in the majority. As Gilovich and Ross point out, “skydivers do not believe that their preferences are shared by most other people” (2016). However, skydivers do tend to think that jumping out of airplanes is preferred by more people than is really the case.
The false consensus effect has been examined in all sorts of places. People think their own ideal vacation is a more common preference than those who would prefer an alternative vacation (Coleman, 2018). Athletes who have used illicit drugs overestimate how much their peers use illicit drugs (Dunn, Thomas, Swift, & Burns, 2011), and drug-using students in school do the same (Wolfson, 2000).One of my favorites (because I can totally relate to this feeling), summer campers think their favorite camp activities are more liked by other kids than they really are (Wetzel & Walton, 1985). And you can bet the false consensus effect applies to how liberals and conservatives overestimate how widely held their own political and social beliefs are relative to the other party (Granberg & Brent, 1983).
For your day to day life, there are two big lessons to take from here. The obvious one being, don’t assume people are ‘coming from the same place’ as you, because odds are they aren’t. This is a key point in miscommunication and, alternatively, good communication. Stay aware that your thought processes, experiences, and conclusions may not be shared by others, even (and especially) when it feels like they should. That may seem like an obvious platitude, but the science of psychology backs it up. The not-so obvious lesson is that the false consensus effect also illustrates how unique we all really are. In a world where the ability to make unique contributions can be weighed in gold (or bitcoin depending on the day), tapping into your uniqueness is a worthy investment. Your ideas and experiences are probably more unique than you might think, so speak up! The next time you pass up an opportunity to speak your mind or offer a thought or try something new because it seems “too obvious,” take a gander at it. You, or your team, might be silently passing up on effective ideas simply by assuming that everyone else is approaching the problem the same as you. Understanding the false consensus effect is helpful because it can help you unlock diverse opinions, experiences, and ways of thinking that were under your nose the whole time. Spice it up a little! And, if for no other reason, while there may not be any ‘wrong’ answers, there are most definitely boring ones.
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References
Coleman, M.D. (2018). Emotion and the False Consensus Effect. Current Psychology, 37(1), pp 58-64. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9489-0
Dunn, M., Thomas, J. O., Swift, W., Burns, L. (2011). Elite athletes’ estimates of the prevalence of illicit drug use: Evidence for the false consensus effect. Drug and Alcohol Review, 31(1). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-3362.2011.00307.x
Gilovich, T., Ross, L. (2016). The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit From Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights. New York: Free Press.
Granberg, D., & Brent, E. (1983). When prophecy bends: The preference–expectation link in U.S. presidential elections, 1952–1980. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 477-491. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.477
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.
Wetzel, C. G., & Walton, M. D. (1985). Developing biased social judgments: The false-consensus effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(5), 1352-1359. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.5.1352
Wolfson, S. (2000). Students’ estimates of the prevalence of drug use: Evidence for a false consensus effect. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 14(3), 296-298.
