The Majority Illusion

Have you felt sometimes that most of your friends are travelling around beautiful places and having a good time while you are struggling in a city managing work and home?

Or you might feel that everyone in your age group has got married and settled down and you are still searching for a partner and nothing is working!! Why am I single while everyone else is married and possibly living happily ever after?

This might be a Majority illusion.

The “majority illusion” suggests that under some conditions, individuals will overestimate the prevalence of some behaviours or the absence of a behaviour or certain attributes. Let's say people might feel everyone is leaving the company and joining a start-up, or there is no empowerment in the organization.

While this could be just an illusion when we dig deeper.

If people who have "felt" attrition is high or there is no empowerment, they will respond like that to a perception-based survey. And most of the surveys we do in organizations are perception based.