False-consensus Effect - Major Theoretical Approaches

Major Theoretical Approaches

The false-consensus effect can be traced back to two parallel theories of social perception, "the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people". The first is the idea of social comparison. The principal claim of Leon Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory was that individuals evaluate their thoughts and attitudes based on other people. This may be motivated by a desire for confirmation and the need to feel good about oneself. As an extension of this theory, people may use others as sources of information to define social reality and guide behavior. This is called informational social influence. The problem, though, is that people are often unable to accurately perceive the social norm and the actual attitudes of others. In other words, research has shown that people are surprisingly poor "intuitive psychologists" and that our social judgments are oftentimes inaccurate. This finding helped to lay the groundwork for an understanding of biased processing and inaccurate social perception. The false-consensus effect is just one example of such an inaccuracy.

The second influential theory is projection, the idea that people project their own attitudes and beliefs onto others. This idea of projection is not a new concept. In fact, it can be found in Sigmund Freud’s work on the defense mechanism of projection (1956), D.S. Holmes' work on "attributive projection" (1968), and Gustav Ichheisser’s work on social perception (1970). D.S. Holmes, for example, described social projection as the process by which people "attempt to validate their beliefs by projecting their own characteristics onto other individuals".

Here, a connection can be made between the two stated theories of social comparison and projection. First, as social comparison theory explains, individuals constantly look to peers as a reference group and are motivated to do so in order to seek confirmation for their own attitudes and beliefs. In order to guarantee confirmation and a higher self-esteem, though, an individual might unconsciously project their own beliefs onto the others (the targets of their comparisons). This final outcome is the false-consensus effect. To summarize, the false-consensus effect can be seen as stemming from both social comparison theory and the concept of projection.

The false-consensus effect, as defined by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, came to be the culmination of the many related theories that preceded it. In their well-known series of four studies, Ross and associates hypothesized and then demonstrated that people tend to overestimate the popularity of their own beliefs and preferences. In each of the studies, subjects or "raters" were asked to choose one of a few mutually-exclusive responses. They would then predict the popularity of each of their choices among other participants, referred to as "actors." To take this a step further, Ross and associates also proposed and tested a related bias in social inferences: they found that raters in an experiment estimated their own response to be not only common, but also not very revealing of the actors' "distinguishing personal dispositions". On the other hand, alternative or opposite responses were perceived as much more revealing of the actors as people. In general, the raters made more "extreme predictions" about the personalities of the actors that did not share the raters' own preference. In fact, the raters may have even thought that there was something wrong with the people expressing the alternative response.

In the ten years after the influential Ross et al. study, close to 50 papers were published with data on the false-consensus effect. Theoretical approaches were also expanded. The theoretical perspectives of this era can be divided into four categories: (a) selective exposure and cognitive availability, (b) salience and focus of attention, (c) logical information processing, and (d) motivational processes. In general, the researchers and designers of these theories believe that there is not a single right answer. Instead, they admit that there is overlap among the theories and that the false-consensus effect is most likely due to a combination of these factors.