By Yiler Huang
False Consensus effects can be observed everywhere in our lives. It is the situation in which a person believes in something and thinks that most people would agree with them, but in reality, their belief might be different from most people. In order to test this effect, this research team designed an online survey. We asked people about their preferences in different areas, and asked them how popular they thought their opinion was. This researcher expected to see the effect actually acting on the results, and expected that most people would think that their belief is the popular one even if it was not.
The online survey included 6 questions about the preferences of respondents, each one has a follow-up question asking them how many people out of 100 they believe would share the same belief with them. The first three questions were about more casual and daily preferences, the other three were about topics that are more controversial. The first question has two versions, one for Taiwanese audiences, and one for audiences that are not from Taiwan. This is because we also surveyed subjects from overseas to increase the sample size. The questions are as follows:
*questions here*
This research team picked out those respondents who chose the options with less votes, then looked at how many people they thought would agree with them. If this number is high, the effect is proven; if this number is low, the effect is not proven.
In total, answers from 25 respondents were collected for the Taiwanese version of the questionnaire, and 31 from respondents from other countries. The age of respondents from the Taiwanese version range from 15 to 27. In the international version, the age of the respondents range from 22 to 57. Although the genders of the respondents were also collected, they will not be discussed as there is a substantial imbalance in the genders of the respondents.
Looking at the responses, we can see some interesting results. From the Taiwanese version of the questionnaire, people think more than 50 people agree with them on each question on average. Which means that on average, more people think that their belief on things are the more popular beliefs. The mean value of how many people respondents thought would agree with them out of 100 ranged from 55.6 (Is it okay to download pirated content?) to 66.2 (Buses or MRT? Which one is better?).
This researcher also discovered engrossing results from the questions that clearly had a more popular answer. On the first question from the Taiwanese version (Buses or MRT? Which one is better?), 80% of respondents thought the MRT was better, and only 20% thought buses were better. However, among the 20% of respondents, 3 of them thought 50 out of 100 people would agree with them, 1 of them thought 87 of 100 of people would agree with them, and the last of them thought all 100 people would agree with them. This is intriguing because it showed that even the minorities among the respondents thought their belief was the average or more common belief, which proves the false consensus effect.
Another question with a more imbalanced result was the 5th question (Should murderers be executed?). 76% of respondents thought murderers should be executed, and 24% thought they shouldn’t. This time only 3 out of 6 respondents thought their answer was the average or more popular option, while the other three thought there would be 10 or even less than 10 people out of 100 who would agree with them.
There seemed to be a limited amount of overlap between the results of the Taiwanese and international version of this survey. The average value of how many people out of 100 they thought would agree with them ranged from 45 (Buses or taxis? Which one do you prefer?), to 61.4 (Is it okay to download pirated content?). This is the exact opposite of the results from the Tainwanese version, but this researcher doesn’t see an obvious reason that caused this to happen. Further research would have to be done to better understand this topic. It seemed like non-Taiwanese respondents were less certain about their opinions on buses and taxis or pineapples on pizzas. Despite being unsure on these two topics, most people still thought that their beliefs were the common one on the other questions.
Looking at the minorities among the international respondents, we could also see the false consensus effect acting on their answers. Only 19.4% of respondents thought taxis were better than buses, but only one of them thought their belief was the more popular one whilst the other 5 respondents thought 65 or more people out of 100 would agree with them. On the question: should murderers be executed?, only 9.7% of respondents thought they should. Meanwhile all of them still thought 50 or even more people would agree with them on this topic. On the last question: should nuclear energy be banned?, 16.1% of the respondents thought it should. 2 of them thought less than 30 people out of 100 would agree with them, 2 answered 50, and the last one answered 60.
From the results gathered from the survey, we can clearly see that the false consensus effect is very common and happens to us very often on some of our decisions. This could vary from our preferences about food, to our opinions on controversial topics regarding ethics and morals. Though the results gathered from different countries might vary, we can still see this effect happening in our lives.