Everyone agrees... right? Why We Think Others Think Like Us

Have you ever assumed everyone sees things the way you do — only to discover they don’t?

In this episode of Circuit Breaker: Rewiring Your Decisions, we explore the False Consensus Effect — our tendency to overestimate how many other people share our beliefs, preferences, and opinions. We look at how our own perspective can become the benchmark for what we think is “normal,” shaping how we interpret the people around us.

But how often do we mistake what feels obvious to us for what everyone else believes? Discover how the False Consensus Effect can influence our judgments, create misunderstandings, and reveal why our own point of view may feel far more universal than it really is.

Studies and links

• The "False Consensus Effect": an Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes | Lee Ross, David Greene and Pamela House | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13 | bulidomics.com PII: 0022-1031(77)90049-X
• False Consensus Effect: Definition and Examples | Simply Psychology