Illusory Social Consensus
When silence is taken as agreement, how can we disrupt illusory consensus beliefs?
Updated March 28, 2025 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Do others agree with you? Do you think they remember an event the same way you do? Do you know if people agree with your thoughts or political views? We often make assumptions about whether others agree with us. How likely are we wrong and how can we do better at reaching a shared understanding?
False Consensus Effect
The first thing to note is that we aren’t very good at estimating whether people share memories, beliefs, and opinions with us. Actually, there’s a fundamental bias called the False Consensus Effect: We assume that people agree with us more than they actually do. This shows up in political attitudes and beliefs that others would likely have the same behaviors as us (Marks & Miller, 1987; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). We also think that others remember events the same way that we remember things (Jalbert, Wulff, & Hyman, 2021).
Repetition and the Illusory Consensus Effect
News media may make this situation worse with respect to many opinions. In a recent paper, Jalbert and Pillai (2024) investigated how repetition influences beliefs that others share the same idea. They conducted a simple study that involved showing people trivia statements. Some were true and some were false; some were repeated and some were only presented once. We already know that repeating statements leads people to rate them as more true – the Illusory Truth Effect (Hasher et al., 1977; Jalbert et al., 2020; Pillai & Fazio, 2021). But does repetition increase your view that others will also think the trivia statements are true? Jalbert and Pillai found that was the case – repeating statements led people to think more people knew and believed the statement.
This Illusory Consensus Effect has substantial real-world consequences. As I noted in a recent post ( How Can We Save Science? ), most people believe that climate change is caused by humans – particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Additionally, people want their governments to do something about climate change. But people have illusory beliefs about consensus. The problem is that most people think that very few others feel the same way. When asked, they underestimate the percentage of people who support various actions to address climate change (Andre et al., 2024; Sparkman et al., 2022). Unfortunately, people have seen lots of statements questioning whether climate change is happening, and false information is often presented with news on climate change (Imundo & Rapp, 2021). This leads people to think that lots of others are skeptical about climate change.
Correcting the Illusory Consensus Effect
An important way to slow the Illusory Consensus Effect is by highlighting your own disagreement. People hear some statements repeated, but they often don’t hear corrections or any disagreement. Without those corrections, they may come to believe that the repeated statements are widely shared. In that case, silence is often taken as agreement. But a correction can serve to disrupt consensus. Sometimes, you don’t have to argue with the ideas (whether in person or online). You can ask questions instead. Simply seeing questions about a claim appear on social media can lead people to be less sure of the idea and doubt it is widely shared (Jalbert, Wack, Arya, & Williams, 2023).
Disrupting the idea that some positions are widely shared is part of the argument that Jalbert and I made for why calling something weird can be useful . Noting that an idea is weird lets other people know that an idea isn’t widely accepted. At least some people considered the idea outside the norms.
Disrupting the Illusory Consensus Effect is important to do. When people encounter an idea repeatedly, they think more people believe it. This also influences their own belief in the idea. But simply countering the idea may be enough to break the Illusory Consensus and Illusory Truth effects. Don’t be silent in the face of false ideas.
Andre, P., Boneva, T., Chopra, F., & Falk, A. (2024). Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. Nature Climate Change , 14 (3), 253-259.
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior , 16 (1), 107-112.
Imundo, M. N., & Rapp, D. N. (2022). When fairness is flawed: Effects of false balance reporting and weight-of-evidence statements on beliefs and perceptions of climate change. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition , 11 (2), 258-271.
Jalbert, M., Newman, E., & Schwarz, N. (2020). Only half of what I’ll tell you is true: Expecting to encounter falsehoods reduces illusory truth. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition , 9 (4), 602-613.
Jalbert, M., Wack, M., Arya, P., & Williams, L. (2023). Social truth queries: Development of a new user-driven intervention for countering online misinformation. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition .
Jalbert, M. C., Wulff, A. N., & Hyman Jr, I. E. (2021). Stealing and sharing memories: Source monitoring biases following collaborative remembering. Cognition , 211 , 104656.
Marks, G., & Miller, N. (1987). Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: An empirical and theoretical review. Psychological bulletin , 102 (1), 72-90.
Pillai, R. M., & Fazio, L. K. (2021). The effects of repeating false and misleading information on belief. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science , 12 (6), e1573.
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of experimental social psychology , 13 (3), 279-301.
Sparkman, G., Geiger, N., & Weber, E. U. (2022). Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half. Nature communications , 13 (1), 4779.
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Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Western Washington University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.