False Consensus Effect: A Focused Review of Research

False Consensus Effect: A Focused Review of Research

Categorization and social projection are important ways that people can more successfully navigate their social environment. People need to know that there are others in their in-group that share the same attitudes and behaviors as they do. If people are unable to determine how many people in their environment share their attitudes and behaviors, it would be more difficult to engage in social situations without offending or contradicting others. For this reason, false consensus is an interesting offshoot of this important idea. The false consensus effect refers to the fact that people have a tendency to over-estimate the proportion of the population that shares an attitude or behavior with him or her.

Much of the research on false consensus has demonstrated that people tend to over project how many members of their in-group are likely to share their attitudes and behaviors. This effect diminishes when comparing to an out-group. It is thought that this occurs because people feel that people who they do not consider to share a group identity with will likely have different basic attitudes and behaviors than they.

An important aspect of the literature is that the vast majority used college students as the primary subjects. While this is extremely convenient for researchers, it may not give us a clear picture about false consensus, in that it is possible that college students' limited "real-world experience" may be influencing their projections. Also, almost all of the behavior measures were taken by self-report. This is somewhat necessary, as many of the behaviors would be difficult to measure directly (e.g., drug use) without a breach of ethics. This too is a source of potential source of error, it is likely that the self-reports would under-estimate the proportion of the population that engages in a particular behavior.

The astute reader may notice that this review does not include any papers that did not find a false consensus effect. The reason for this is not that this paper is not representative of the literature, but rather, that it is. The uniformity of the literature suggests that the phenomenon is fairly common. Some interesting arguments as to why this is are motivational or cognitive in nature. The motivational premise is based in the idea that people are motivated to believe that they have a place in their social environment. This argument is a based in self-justification, in that if many people share a given belief or behavior, it makes it easier to justify that this attitude or behavior is either right, or not as bad as it might seem. The cognitive argument centers on the availability heuristic, in that if one has a particular attitude or belief, it is easier to think of examples of people who share that belief because they have themselves as a primary example. Because both of these arguments make the same predictions, the value of each will not be presented here.

In 1977, Ross, Greene and House performed on of the first experiments on false consensus. In the first experiment of this study, the subjects (undergraduate students at the authors' university) were presented with a story that dealt with common situations for the time period (supermarket, term paper, traffic ticket, and space program referendum). At the end of the story, there was a clear behavioral choice, and subjects were asked to indicate what percentage of their peers would be for and against the behavioral choice. Finally, subjects were asked to state whether they felt that someone who would perform the behaviors listed was a typical or atypical representative of someone of the same age and sex as they were. It was found that for each story, subjects felt that a typical person would make the same behavior decision as they did, giving us a hint that a false consensus effect may exist.

This type of study is an interesting way to observe consensus effects, though it is impossible to determine whether or not the subjects' own behavior would actually mirror the behavior indicated during testing. Secondly, it is difficult to determine why a person would say that a typical person would not do as they would, in that generally, people do not think of themselves as atypical. It seems that the only way a subject would make a counter-behavioral statement would be if they knew they were atypical members of the group.

In a second experiment (experiment 4 of the paper), subjects were actually put in situations, and later asked how many others they felt would do the same. This has the distinct advantage of including actual behavior. In order to accomplish this, the subjects were asked to wear a sign with one of two messages ("Eat at Joe's" or "Repent"). Subjects were university students who were participating under the guise of an experiment designed to study the reactions of others to the sign. Again, a false consensus effect was demonstrated, with no difference with regard to the message of the sign. This experiment is especially important in the false consensus literature because of the actual behavior dimension.

The ability of people to determine the social distribution of attitudes and behaviors and how they shaped these distributions in light of their own stance is of extreme importance in determining if there is a false consensus effect. In order to determine the ability of subjects to determine social distributions in general Nisbett and Kunda (1985) performed an experiment in which some subjects were asked about their frequency of behavior, some about their attitudes on a particular subject, and finally, two other groups were asked about their impressions of the behavior and attitudes of others, respectively. A sample of convenience of introductory psychology students was used, and subjects were asked to determine how many students at the university held the various attitudes and behaviors tested for, thus testing for consensus within an in-group. It was found that subjects were relatively good at determining the reported behavior of those in the in-group, with a trend towards over-estimation.

The second study provided support, though modest, for a false consensus effect. In this study, the subjects were asked about the same attitudinal and behavioral features as in the first study. In the second study, however, all subjects were asked about their behavior and attitudes, as well as the frequency of those same attitudes and behaviors in the university population. It was found that subjects remained fairly accurate at determining the reported behavior of their in-groups, though the mean tended towards the subjects' own views. It is important to note, however, that the frequency of the perceived behavior given by subjects more closely matched reported behavior of the group than the