[1] In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
The false-consensus effect is not restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority, but it still manifests as an overestimate of the extent of their belief.
[4] Ross, Green and House first defined the false consensus effect in 1977 with emphasis on the relative commonness that people perceive about their own responses; however, similar projection phenomena had already caught attention in psychology.
For instances, Katz and Allport in 1931 illustrated that students’ estimates of the amount of others on the frequency of cheating was positively correlated to their own behavior.
[4] Moreover, recent studies suggest that the false consensus effect can also affect professional decision makers; specifically, it has been shown that even experienced marketing managers project their personal product preferences onto consumers.
[7][8] 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 principal claim of Leon Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory was that individuals evaluate their thoughts and attitudes based on other people.
In other words, research has shown that people are surprisingly poor "intuitive psychologists" and that our social judgments are often inaccurate.
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 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.
[3] In the ten years after the influential Ross et al. study, close to 50 papers were published with data on the false-consensus effect.
[16] This theory is closely tied to the availability heuristic, which suggests that perceptions of similarity (or difference) are affected by how easily those characteristics can be recalled from memory.
This selected exposure to similar people may bias or restrict the "sample of information about the true diversity of opinion in the larger social environment".
[18] This theory suggests that when an individual focuses solely on their own preferred position, they are more likely to overestimate its popularity, thus falling victim to the false-consensus effect.
[17] In a study done by Fox, Yinon, and Mayraz, researchers were attempting to determine whether or not the levels of the false-consensus effect changed in different age groups.
[21] Rogers, Moore, and Norton (2017)[21] find that belief in a favorable future is greater in magnitude than the false-consensus effect for two reasons: