A wise woman once taught me a nice
little way in order to “trick” people into revealing information
about themselves without them intending to, through an attribution
bias called the false consensus effect.
The
principle of the false
consensus effect
is that individuals overestimate the rate at which others will share
their beliefs, and it occurs because human beings want our feelings
and beliefs to be shared amongst all people, therefore making it
correct (Krueger, 1998; Ross, Greene & House, 1977). I decided to
test this bias on a couple guys on the lacrosse team (for their
protection I wont use their names). I went to one of the players of
whom it was rumored that they were once caught watching pornography
on his computers and asked him (not completely out of the blue),
“what percentage of americans do you think watch porn?”. His
estimate was around 80% of people among both men and woman in
America. Later in practice, while talking amongst a couple of guys, I
posed the question again to them, and most of them gave a similar
number, all above 70%. I also wanted to see if anyone would give me a
number lower than what the previous people were giving me, which
would indicate under the aforementioned effect that they most likely
did not watch pornography themselves. After a few more failed
attempts, I one person did in fact give me a different number. As one
of the more known religious players on the team, it was not
surprising when he estimated that only around 40% of Americans view
pornography (thank the Lord there is at least one innocent kid on the
team). After practice, I came home and then asked my roommates the
exact same question, and got an emphatic 90% and 80% and then
revealed to them that I was then aware that they watched pornography.
When they asked me the percentage (which I could not find a study to
give percentage), I told them around 68%, and they immediately
scoffed and told me that that number could not be true, which then
caused me to call them out on them performing perfectly the base
rate fallacy,
a heuristic that states that people are likely to ignore statistical
information and more likely to believe cases they have experienced
themselves, which is of course less reliable (Gilovich et at., 2002;
Kahneman et al., 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In confronting them
with this information, that's when they started ignoring me again and
went back to watching Duck Dynasty.
Words
- 426
References
Gilovich,
T., Medvec, V.H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in
social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the slience of
one's own actions and appearance. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 78,
211-222.
Kahneman,
D., Slovic, P., & Traversky, A.(Eds.). (1982). Judgment
under uncertainty: Heuristic and biases.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Krueger,
J. (1998). On the perception of social consensus. Advances
in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 163-240.
Nisbett,
R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human
inference: Strategies and short-comings of social judgment.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ross,
L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus
phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception processes.
Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology,
13,
279-301.
