Scientific Method —

Never mind the polls—we’re convinced our candidate is going to win

How much do we value our own opinions? We're willing to believe that other …

Imagine you’re asked to do something out of the ordinary, like carry around a funny sign for a day or eat a food that doesn’t look so appetizing. Then you’re asked how many other people might say yes to the strange request. Past studies have shown that, if you agreed to carry the sign or eat the food, you’re much more likely to believe that lots of other people would say yes to the request too. Alternatively, if you declined, you’d probably think that the majority of people would say no. The same pattern holds true if you are asked about something like recycling; you’re more likely to believe that other people value recycling if you do.

This positive association between our beliefs and our perceptions of social beliefs—called “false consensus”—generally occurs when we don’t have a lot of information about what others might do or believe. When we don’t know what other people think, we tend to make assumptions based on our own preferences. 

A group of researchers wondered whether the effect would occur when there is a lot of publicly available information about what other people think: during elections. Even with frequent and well-publicized political polls, are people’s beliefs about the outcome of an election tied to their own preferences?

The PNAS study used data from the Rand Corporation’s American Life Panel (ALP), a survey administered online to Americans 18 and older. In the fall of 2008, the ALP asked respondents how likely they were to vote for Barack Obama, John McCain, or a third candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Then, they were asked how likely each candidate was to win the election. In 2010, respondents were asked similar questions about the senatorial and gubernatorial elections in their home states.

In each instance, the false consensus effect occurred. The more a respondent favored a particular candidate, the higher they estimated his or her chances of winning the election. For instance, those who were positive they would not vote for Obama estimated his chances of winning the election at 40 percent, those who said they were equally torn between Obama and McCain estimated Obama’s chances at 51 percent. The people who were absolutely positive they would vote for Obama thought that there was a 65 percent chance he would become president. The results held true for both candidates, as well as for the state elections in 2010.

These patterns persisted no matter how the results were stratified: respondents of every age, race, and education level thought that their preferred candidate was more likely to win the election. When people changed their candidate preferences over time, their expectations about the outcome of the election shifted as well.

Researchers think that false consensus arises when people extrapolate their preferences to others when they don’t have much public information to go on. However, the effect in this instance is somewhat unexpected, since public opinions are well known thanks to political polling. The researchers acknowledge that the factors at work in this example of false consensus may not be the same ones behind other instances of the phenomenon.

In a statement that seems to apply as much to society in general as it does to this study, the researchers write, "It thus appears that Americans, despite having access to the same publicly available information, nevertheless inhabit disparate perceptual worlds."

PNAS, 2012. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200861109  (About DOIs).

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