The truly false consensus effect: an ineradicable and egocentric bias in social perception.

J Krueger, RW Clement - Journal of personality and social …, 1994 - psycnet.apa.org
J Krueger, RW Clement
Journal of personality and social psychology, 1994psycnet.apa.org
Consensus bias is the overuse of self-related knowledge in estimating the prevalence of
attributes in a population. The bias seems statistically appropriate (RM Dawes; see record
1989-25841-001), but according to the egocentrism hypothesis, it merely mimics normative
inductive reasoning. In Exp 1, Ss made population estimates for agreement with each of 40
personality inventory statements. Even Ss who had been educated about the consensus
bias, or had received feedback about actual consensus, or both showed the bias. In Exp 2 …
Abstract
Consensus bias is the overuse of self-related knowledge in estimating the prevalence of attributes in a population. The bias seems statistically appropriate (RM Dawes; see record 1989-25841-001), but according to the egocentrism hypothesis, it merely mimics normative inductive reasoning. In Exp 1, Ss made population estimates for agreement with each of 40 personality inventory statements. Even Ss who had been educated about the consensus bias, or had received feedback about actual consensus, or both showed the bias. In Exp 2, Ss attributed bias to another person, but their own consensus estimates were more affected by their own response to the item than by the other person's response. In Exp 3, there was bias even in the presence of unanimous information from 20 randomly chosen others. In all 3 experiments, Ss continued to show consensus bias despite the availability of other statistical information.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
American Psychological Association