False consensus in social context: Differential projection and perceived social distance

The study implicates the notion of perceived social distance as an explanation of why ingroup false consensus exceeds outgroup false consensus. Whilst previous demonstrations are best understood from social identity perspectives, the findings reported here suggest that self‐group as well as inter‐group comparisons can underlie such effects. In particular, perceived social distance was shown to mediate the effect of social categorisation: ingroup false consensus was greater because more social distance was perceived with the outgroup. The findings also extended to non‐student samples and generalised across both opinion and ability items. In addition, examining the effect of item type in conjunction with social categorisation seriously challenged the generality of the false consensus effect.