Interesting Results

I Like It, So You Must Too

Researchers have long been aware that people tend to overestimate the extent to which other people share their opinions, but new research shows that this effect is more pronounced for things that people like (as opposed to those they dislike). The new research identifies a possible explanation for this difference: it relates to the ease or difficulty of coming up with reasons that other people may have different opinions. When people like something they tend to like all aspects of it, whereas when they dislike it, it is often due to one or two specific attributes. This makes it easier to think of positive attributes of disliked products than to think of negative attributes of liked products, and that in turn makes it easier to think of people who may like a product we dislike than to think of people who would dislike a product we like. And while we may not be fully conscious of the process, it’s the generation of those counter-examples that we use to form estimates of how widely held our opinions are.

¹ Gershoff, Andrew D., Ashesh Mukherjee, and Anirban Mukhopadhyay (2008), “What’s Not to Like? Preference Asymmetry in the False Consensus Effect”, Journal of Marketing, 35(1), 119-125.