Gun Fanatics Express Their Support For a Mass Murderer’s Second Amendment Rights

[friendly_iconoclast]

111. The false consensus effect is strong amongst you lot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect

The false-consensus effect is not necessarily restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority. The false-consensus effect is also evidenced when people overestimate the extent to which their particular belief is correlated with the belief of others. Thus, fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that the majority of people share their views, but their estimates of the number of people who share their point of view will tend to exceed the actual number.

This bias is especially prevalent in group settings where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

Additionally, when confronted with evidence that a consensus does not exist, people often assume that those who do not agree with them are defective in some way...

...The false-consensus effect, as defined by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, came to be the culmination of the many related theories that preceded it. In their well-known series of four studies, Ross and associates hypothesized and then demonstrated that people tend to overestimate the popularity of their own beliefs and preferences.[8] In each of the studies, subjects or "raters" were asked to choose one of a few mutually-exclusive responses. They would then predict the popularity of each of their choices among other participants, referred to as "actors". To take this a step further, Ross and associates also proposed and tested a related bias in social inferences: they found that raters in an experiment estimated their own response to be not only common, but also not very revealing of the actors' "distinguishing personal dispositions".[9] On the other hand, alternative or opposite responses were perceived as much more revealing of the actors as people. In general, the raters made more "extreme predictions" about the personalities of the actors that did not share the raters' own preference. In fact, the raters may have even thought that there was something wrong with the people expressing the alternative response.

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/why-we-all-stink-as-intuitive.php