False consensus

“People tend to think that those who don’t think the way they do have something wrong with them.” Not a very extraordinary observation, but no less interesting for that.

Social psychologists talk about a cognitive bias called “false consensus”, which consists of people’s tendency to see “their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances while viewing alternative responses as uncommon, deviant, or inappropriate”.

All fundamentalism starts from this notion of false consensus: “what is good for me is good for everyone”, “this policy is the right one and the best for the state and its citizens, and nobody with half a brain can question it”, “the Koran is a book that preaches hatred, so it has to be burned”, and so on, an endless list of examples.

Professor Lee Ross, of Stanford University, ran a series of experiments in 1977, which allowed him to investigate this phenomenon. And the conclusion of that study is that we are terrible predictors of other people’s behavior.

That study shows how terrible we are at predicting what others will do. Think about the consequences of this:

“… to think that, for example, our idea that the elderly are useless people can lead us to develop negative behaviors toward them, but if on top of that we believe it is something everybody thinks, there is no reason whatsoever to change that cognition.

Besides, radical attitudes toward people with different beliefs are the order of the day; pinning negative personality traits on those in “the opposing camp”, without even knowing them at all (mind you, in this study the people who chose the opposite didn’t even exist), can lead to very negative social consequences such as discrimination or marginalization, because if we already know they are bad people, why would we bother getting to know them better?”

Anyone who has been in the unpleasant position of arguing with a free software fundamentalist has come face to face with this phenomenon.

It may also be what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences”, which Joel Spolsky captures very nicely in “Fork It!”. Because not even among those who “agree on the fundamentals” is there consensus, as this clip from Life of Brian, by the brilliant Monty Python, shows:

So which side are you on: those who use Linux, or GNU/Linux? And remember, everybody knows that free software is the key to developing the IT industry in Chile and Latin America.

:D