Summary: In psychology, the false consensus effect is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate the degree of agreement that others have with them.

There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are ‘normal’ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias tends to cause people to assume that the majority of others think the same way they do, leading to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a ‘false consensus’ a supposed consensus does not in fact exist.

The false consensus effect tends to exaggerate the trust that individuals place on their own beliefs, even if they are wrong.

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False Consensus Effect

We tend to overestimate how the degree to which our own behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and so on are shared by other people.

This may be because our friends and people we spend time with are indeed like us, and we use the Availability Heuristic to deduce that many other people are similar (our own beliefs, etc. are also very available). When there is limited information on which to base a good estimate, then what we believe is a fair alternative to a wild guess. We will use false consensus more when we attribute our own behavior to external factors as these are the same factors which presumed to affect others. False consensus also helps reinforce my own motivations.

False consensus is stronger when:

The behavior is seen to come from strong situational factors.

The matter at hand is seen as being important to the person.

When we are largely sure we are correct.

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Mind Projection Fallacy

In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing, as lovingly depicted on many ancient magazine covers. Oddly enough, the aliens never go after men in torn shirts.

Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female? It seems rather unlikely. To put it mildly.

People don’t make mistakes like that by deliberately reasoning: “All possible minds are likely to be wired pretty much the same way, therefore a bug-eyed monster will find human females attractive.” Probably the artist did not even think to ask whether an alien perceives human females as attractive. Instead, a human female in a torn dress is sexy – inherently so, as an intrinsic property.

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