YOUR OPINIONS ARE NOT AS POPULAR AS YOU THINK THEY ARE
Four decades ago, Lee Ross and his colleagues asked students at Stanford University to do a very unusual thing. They asked them to walk around the Stanford campus for half an hour wearing a large sandwich board that read “Repent,” counting the number of people who spoke with them while they walked around wearing the sign. Presumably, the data from this unusual task would become part of a study of “communication techniques.”
In reality, the researchers wanted to compare students who said yes and those who said no to this unusual request. Ross and his colleagues observed something surprising. Students who agreed to the unusual request believed that a clear majority of other students would also agree to do so. But students who refused to carry the sign around campus believed that a clear majority of other students would also refuse.
This tendency is known as the false consensus effect. We often believe that there is more consensus — that is, more agreement — for what we say, think, and do than is really the case.
False consensus effects apply to all kinds of judgments, but they are much more pronounced for people who are in the statistical minority than for people in the statistical majority. The extremely rare people who believe that the earth is flat, for example, are very, very likely to overestimate…
