Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias
Many people 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 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.
One of these biases is called the false consensus bias. In the 1970s Stanford University social psychologist Professor Lee Ross set out to show just how the false consensus bias operates in two neat studies (Ross, Greene & House, 1977).
False consensus
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:
- Guess which option other people would choose,
- Say which option they would choose,
- Describe the attributes of the person who would choose each of the two options.
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' bias - 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.
Eat at Joe's!
While the finding from the first study 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.
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. 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."
We're poor intuitive psychologists
This study is fascinating not only because it shows a bias in how we think about others' behaviours 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!):
1. I could have told you that - it's obvious!
2. No, in my experience that's not true - people don't really behave like that.
As this social psychology study shows, people are actually pretty poor intuitive psychologists. 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?
Well, apparently not. Although knowing that we don't know other people is a great start.
And that is one good reason why we need psychology studies.
» Read more of the top 10 social psychology experiments.
Reference
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279-301.
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I believe that I am a fairly intuitive person. More so than your average bear. I will go with the fact that most of us overrate ourselves. I would rate myself, on a scale of 1-10, a high 7. When I was younger I kicked myself on a regular basis for NOT listening to my intuition, mostly about people & occasionally certain situations.
Mar e.t., “And intuition is not something you can develop. You either have it or you don't. It is kind of like animal nature. The question is not can you increase your ability to be intuitive, it is can you increase your ability
to use the intuition that you were given. To interpret what your intuition is saying. Intuition is a gift if you have it.” As I have gotten older I have learned what that “gut” feeling feels like & what to do with it. I have improved my ablity with exprience. One of the problems with intuition is listening. It’s hard to stand firm on a choice with no substantial facts to back your descion other than a nagging feeling. But I have learned to listen because I have regretted not following my “gut”.
I believe that we all have “it”. The vast majority of society has no insight to who they really are, much less other people. They wander thru thier lives witout ever giving any real thought as to who they are & why they are who they are. Much less anybody else. It’s a very self absorbed world. Without the insight of one’s own self, there is no way for any intuition to be felt. Intuition is, just that, a feeling. To think conscienecly or unconsciencly, that because one does not make the same descion as ourselves, that someone is not “NORMAL” is selfish.
Maybe I can see it different because I am one of those that has never felt “normal”, but very different. When it comes to people, what is normal? Is there such a thing? My “gut” tells me there is no such thing!
I find this topic interesting & would like to share another view point on the subject but I fear that I am starting to ramble. So I will quit. But my thought is this; when a person is entirely off base, just plain wrong, about thier gut feeling? Although they insist there is truth to thier convictions? But rather the reasoning is based on one’s own past behavior and choices & not on any feeling? I’m not sure that I expressed this correctly or clearly for that matter.
I did some simple number crunching with the following assumptions:
* The false consensus bias exists
* A perfect 50/50 split won't happen.
* The false consensus bias may be represented by a value, which is the percentage of people who will think others will agree with them.
For the following calculations, the bias value is 65% (it's close enough to the "real" figures above):
* With a 100/0 split, 65% correctly predict other's actions.
* With a 80/0 split, 59% correctly predict other's actions.
* With a 60/0 split, 53% correctly predict other's actions.
If false consensus bias is operating, it seems to work better than chance. If I increase the bias value to 100% to see what happens at the extreme:
* With a 100/0 split, 100% correctly predict other's actions.
* With a 80/0 split, 80% correctly predict other's actions.
* With a 60/0 split, 60% correctly predict other's actions.
Increasing the bias seems to increase accuracy. The false consensus bias doesn't seem to explain 'why we all stink as intuitive psychologists' because we make better predictions when we just going along with it.
This dwelling on falseness is more parasitic than beneficial, I try to appreciate interests and lead them to the fulcrum of imbalance so they can choose better by intuitive appreciation, relieving rational opaqueness. The worse can drop away by their gravity as we lighten our paths with poetic suggestion. Intuition suggests art while rationalization is scientific and both must be balance for the best awareness. ~ for better (benefit) or worse (parasitic)
if lets say i know i dont think like others and i realize that the stuff i do others would think im crazy, only because i realize that every one person has a diff way of looking at things, would make me an intuitive psychologist. i realize that people say im going to do this but then i know they are going to do something else that follows their patterns as a person and i know all of this just without research i jus realize this because from what the article says we all beleieve we would be a good psych but most wouldnt, i am majoring in psych and i would like some feedback to as what a true psych thinks? i beleieve that i would be a great psych only because i understand that people are very pridefull and that they say this because of their pride but when it comes down to it they will do the normal thing that they normally do?
or it could be that the individuals start off by basing their decisions on what they think the majority of people would choose, as opposed to choosing for themselves and afterwards figuring that most other people would probably do the same. and then when the subjects give very negative opinions of those who would choose a different course, perhaps the subjects are really just sensitive about the validity their own choices, so they say things like, "only a [insert negative comment] would do that." the negative response could be particularly vehement if the participant was originally going to choose the opinion/course of action that they are now condemning, but then changed his or her mind. which i suppose would be cognitive dissonance.
Anon, you're partly talking about conformity here which I'm sure you're right has a role to play in people's thought processes along with cognitive dissonance.
This is symptom of the practical fact that psychologists often find it difficult to isolate particular processes as, necessarily, they're all working at once in our minds.
As described, this experiment doesn't demonstrate what this article says it does! Correlation is not causation.
The article suggests that people know their own behavior and from that make judgments about how others would behave. Far more plausible is that people have models as to what constitute "normal" behavior -- what they think other people would do -- and conform to it. That is, of course the subjects thought that most people would behave the way they themselves did: they behaved that way because they thought other people would behave that way; of course the subjects thought that people who didn't behave that way were characterologically more extreme; those others were people who were failing to tell what was normal.
I must say that I can see quite a few different interpretations of this. I would guess that if they had asked people what they thought most people would do in these situations prior to asking them to make a choice for themselves, the results would have come out a bit different. I expect that if the subjects didn't already have a vested interest in one answer already, they might have been better "intuitive psychologists".
Perhaps this only says that people will believe what they feel is in their own interest. Isn't it interesting that social psychologists interpret it to mean that we all need social psychologists.
While it is very easy to be critical of the subject's intuition, it may also be noted they were given very little information by the experimenter. As a comparison, how successful would the subject have been if they had approached the question of whether or not others would wear the board from a logical and deductive angle?
The subject was simply asked if they thought others would agree to wear the sandwich board. The experimenter gave the subject no information on the traits or attributes of these "others". Thus, from a deductive angle, if I were a subject, I would only be left to assume that these "others" were people involved in the experiment that were very similar to myself. With this assumption, if I, as a hypothetical subject, were to be asked the by the experimenter what I thought the "others" would do, I would answer that the others would be most likely to make the exact same decision as myself.
The greatest problem with this experiment is that the subject was simply asked, in a black and white fashion, how they thought another subject would respond. This question does not challenge our intuition, as it has only two distinct answers, neither of which can be answered with any confidence. A much better question for the experimenter to ask would be, "What percentage of other subjects do you [the subject] believe will wear the board?"
If we were to then answer this question as logically as possible, we would have to estimate the chance that people we don't know anything about would respond to a question they have most likely never heard before. With the information given, we do not have near enough information to answer the question logically, and are forced to use our intuition. It is ridiculous to expect our intuition to be accurate under such pretenses, and the true flaw in a subject would not be if they predicted the "others" to be similar to themselves, but if the subject had any confidence in their prediction.
From this angle, I think that the subjects response had more to do with their assumptions about the "others" than their own intuition. The experiment cannot be extended to show that people innately expect others to do the same as them, because the nature of the experiment implies that the "others" ARE the same as them. I think that the statistics are deceptive, and that while the simplicity of an psychological experiment is very important, this case is far too simple to be meaningfully interpreted.
I am not in any way trying to disprove the conclusions of the experiment, which are completely logical and coherent. In contrast, I am simply saying that the results of the experiment are not sufficient to justify such conclusions.