What Underlies the False Consensus Effect? How Personal Opinion and Disagreement Affect Perception of Public Opinion

Abstract

This study draws on a sample of participants in online groups to analyze the interaction between individual-level and communicative-level factors that affect public opinion perception. We first assess the association between individual views on several issues—the death penalty, gun regulation and teaching morality in public schools—and false consensus, i.e., the tendency to attribute own views to others. We also examine whether the association between individual opinion and false consensus is mitigated by perceived disagreement with offline discussion networks and with participants in online discussion groups. As expected, not only is there a correlation between personal and perceived opinion, but also those who strongly favor the three policies estimate public support to be higher than do those who are unfavorable or moderate. Multivariate models further show that encountering disagreement, online or offline, attenuates the association between the individual opinion and false consensus. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

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