False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency to overestimate the extent to which one's opinions are also shared by others. It was first formally addressed in an influential article by Ross, which drew from several social psychological and personality-related themes, such as attribution theory and projection. In four carefully constructed experiments, the authors found “that raters’ perceptions of social consensus and their social inferences about actors reflect the raters’ own behavioral choices” (p. 294). They also observed that the phenomenon applied to numerous aspects of behavior, feelings, opinions, and characteristics, a finding that has been repeatedly supported in the literature. A meta-analysis of 115 tests in 23 studies found that the false consensus effect is a robust and reliable phenomenon. Keywords: cognition; social cognition

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