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The false consensus effect in social psychology is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate how much others share their beliefs and behaviours.
The false consensus effect in social psychology is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate how much others share their beliefs and behaviours.
The false consensus effect, or consensus bias, is the social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.
It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.
Here are some examples of the false consensus effect:
It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.
We each have information built up from countless previous experiences involving both ourselves and others so surely we should have solid insights?
No such luck.
In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.
And these biases help to show exactly why we need psychology experiments and why we can’t rely on our intuitions about the behaviour of others.
In the 1970s Stanford University social psychologist Professor Lee Ross set out to show just how the false consensus effect operates in two neat experiments (Ross, Greene & House, 1977).
In the first study, participants were asked to read about situations in which a conflict occurred and then told two alternative ways of responding.
They were asked to do three things:
The results showed more people thought others would do the same as them, regardless of which of the two responses they actually chose themselves.
This shows what Ross and colleagues dubbed the false consensus effect – the idea that we each think other people think the same way we do when actually they often don’t.
Another bias emerged when participants were asked to describe the attributes of the person who made the opposite choice to their own.
Compared to other people who made the same choice they did, people made more extreme predictions about the personalities of those who made didn’t share their choice.
To put it a little crassly: people tend to assume that those who don’t agree with them have something wrong with them!
It might seem like a joke, but it is a real bias that people demonstrate.
While the finding from the first study on the false consensus effect is all very well in theory, how can we be sure people really behave the way they say they will?
After all, psychologists have famously found little connection between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.
In a second study, therefore, Ross and colleagues abandoned hypothetical situations, paper and pencil test and instead took up the mighty sandwich board to further test the false consensus effect.
This time a new set of participants, who were university students, were asked if they would be willing to walk around their campus for 30 minutes wearing a sandwich board saying: “Eat at Joe’s”.
(No information is available about the food quality at ‘Joe’s’, and consequently how foolish students would look.)
For motivation, participants were simply told they would learn ‘something useful’ from the study, but that they were absolutely free to refuse if they wished.
The results of this study confirmed the previous study on the false consensus effect.
Of those who agreed to wear the sandwich board, 62% thought others would also agree.
Of those who refused, only 33% thought others would agree to wear the sandwich board.
Again, as before, people also made more extreme predictions about the type of person who made the opposite decision to their own.
You can just imagine how that thinking might go.
The people who agreed to carry the sandwich board might have said:
“What’s wrong with someone who refuses?
I think they must be really scared of looking like a fool.”
While the people who refused:
“Who are these show-offs who agreed to carry the sandwich board?
I know people like them – they’re weird.”
This study is fascinating not only because it shows the false consensus effect, but also because it demonstrates the importance of psychology studies themselves.
Every psychologist has, at some point, been driven to distraction when trying to explain a study’s finding by one form of the following two arguments (amongst others!):
As this social psychology study of the false consensus effect shows, people are actually pretty poor intuitive psychologists.
Along with people being poor intuitive psychologists, there are a number of reasons the false consensus effect occurs.
One of the few exceptions to this is when the answer is really really obvious, such as asking people whether it is OK to commit murder.
But questions we can all agree on are generally not as interesting as those on which we are divided.
People are also more likely to assume someone who doesn’t hold the same views as them has a more extreme personality than their own.
This is because people think to themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, surely all right-thinking (read ‘normal’) people think the same way as me?
Other factors that influence the false consensus effect include:
→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:
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The bystander effect is when the presence of others reduces helping behaviours. It is caused partly by a diffusion of responsibility.
The bystander effect is when the presence of others reduces helping behaviours. It is caused partly by a diffusion of responsibility.
The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.
The bystander effect study is mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.
This classic social psychology study on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.
John Darley and Bibb Latane were inspired to investigate emergency helping behaviours and the bystander effect after the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.
Genovese, a 28-year-old, was attacked and stabbed by a man later identified as Winston Moseley while on her way home from work.
Despite repeatedly calling for help, none of the people within earshot came to her rescue or reported the incident to the police.
The newspaper report of the murder stated that 38 people had heard and seen the attack, which lasted an hour, yet they did nothing.
People seemed to be displaying the bystander effect.
Subsequent reports, however, suggest the number of witnesses was much lower and few, perhaps none, had witnessed the whole attack.
Whatever the status of this incident the facts of the subsequent bystander effect study are well-known.
Participants were invited into the lab under the pretext they were taking part in a discussion about ‘personal problems’ (Darley & Latane, 1968).
Participants in the bystander effect experiment were talking to a number of unknown others, varying from just one up to four in each of the experimental trials.
Because of the sensitive nature of the discussion they were told the discussion would take place over an intercom.
In fact this was just a ruse to ensure the participants couldn’t physically see the other people they were talking to and ruin this test of the bystander effect.
During the discussion one member of the group would suddenly appear to be having an epileptic seizure.
Here is the script:
“I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody er-er-er-er-er-er-er give me a little-er-give me a little help here because-er-I-er-I’m-er-erh-h-having a-a-a real problem-er-right now and I-er-if somebody could help me out it would-it would-er-er s-s-sure be-sure be good . . . because-there-er-er-a cause I-er-I-uh-I’ve got a-a one of the-er-sei er-er-things coming on and-and-and I could really-er-use some help so if somebody would-er-give me a little h-help-uh-er-er-er-er-er c-could somebody-er-er-help-er-uh-uh-uh (choking sounds). . . . I’m gonna die-er-er-I’m . . . gonna die-er-help-er-er-seizure-er-[chokes, then quiet].”
The experimenters then measured how long it took for participants to go the person’s aid.
The results of the bystander effect experiment clearly showed that the more people were involved in the group discussion, the slower participants were to respond to the apparent emergency.
It seems that the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours.
Some participants made no move to intervene in the apparent emergency — they displayed bystander apathy.
What was going on?
Darley and Latane (1968) report that those who did not act were far from uncaring about the seizure victim.
Quite the reverse in fact, compared to those who did report the emergency, they appeared to be in a more heightened state of arousal.
Many were sweating, had trembling hands and looked to be in considerable discomfort.
The non-helpers in the bystander effect experiment appeared to be caught in a double bind that locked them up.
One part of them felt shame and guilt for not helping.
Another part of them didn’t want to expose themselves to embarrassment or to ruin the experiment which, they had been told depended on each conversant remaining anonymous from the others.
Psychologically, what is happening in the bystander effect is that people feel less urgency the more people are present.
This diffusion of responsibility occurs because there are more people who could help.
Each person thinks to themselves that someone else will do something about it.
Then, when other bystanders do not react either, people take this as a sign that there is no need to help out.
Now compare this study of the bystander effect with the Milgram experiment.
Certainly the Milgram experiment on obedience casts a long shadow over this bystander effect experiment.
Similar to the Milgram situation, participants here were put under pressure to continue with the experiment by authority figures (the psychologists).
Again, someone was suffering discomfort and participants felt conflicted about whether or not to intervene.
In this case in an epileptic seizure, in Milgram’s study, it was the electrical shocks participants themselves were administering.
This bystander effect study’s originality comes from the finding that the more people are present, the longer participants take to help.
And this is certainly an important insight in social psychological terms.
Because of the way the bystander effect experiment was set up, participants had no way of knowing how the other people who heard the seizure had responded.
This meant that the only variable was how many other people they knew to be present.
Modern studies have not always supported the validity of the bystander effect in the real world.
For example, a recent study of real public fights caught on CCTV showed that bystanders intervened 90 percent of the time to help victims of violence (Philpot et al., 2020).
The 219 fights included in the study had broken out on the streets of Amsterdam, Cape Town and Leicester (in the Netherlands, South Africa and UK, respectively).
Nine-out-of-ten times at least one person tried to intervene, sometimes more than one.
This strongly suggests that trying to help is the norm in public, rather than the exception as the bystander effect suggests.
This modern study paints rather a different picture of the bystander effect than social psychological research conducted in the 1960s.
Many subsequent studies have shown that whether people will help you out in public depends on a whole range of factors, including:
→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:
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