Porn Viewing Among My Colleagues.

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.

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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.