The False Consensus Effect: Is the Self-Justification Hypothesis Justified?

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Abstract
The false consensus effect refers to the finding that individuals who engage in a given behavior believe that the behavior is more prevalent than those who do not. Two studies were conducted to examine the self-justification hypothesis that individuals exaggerate the prevalence of their behavior for self-enhancement reasons. In both studies, subjects were led to believe they had succeeded or failed on a task and were asked to estimate the percentage of other subjects who had performed similarly, in Study 1, the task was to choose the authentic note out of pairs of suicide notes. In Study 2, the goal was to identify the Turkish translation of an English word in what was described as a language acquisition task. Contrary to predictions based on the self-justification hypothesis, in both studies subjects who succeeded gave higher estimates of consensus than those who failed. Alternative interpretations of the results were discussed.

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