deepstash
Beta
The egocentric bias
It is a cognitive bias that causes people to rely too much on their own point of view when they examine or remember events in their life.
This means that people tend to either underestimate how different other people’s viewpoint is from their own, or to ignore other people’s viewpoint entirely.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
- When you are giving a public talk, you assume that your nervousness is more apparent to others than is actually the case.
- You overestimate the amount of work that you contributed to a group project.
- You might believe that your colleagues all share your political beliefs and social values.
- You might remember yourself as having been the key player in a past event, despite the fact that you only played a relatively minor role in it.
It occurs primarily due to the fact that we tend to naturally examine and remember events primarily through our personal point of view.
Even when we realize that we should adjust our perspective to see things through other people’s eyes, we tend to anchor this new perspective to our own, and we often fail to adjust from our original viewpoint enough to properly assess how other people feel.
... on the likelihood that a person will experience the egocentric bias:
- Age: it appears that adolescents and older adults display increased egocentricity compared to young and middle-aged adults.
- The number the languages spoken: bilinguals appear to be less likely to experience the egocentric bias than monolinguals.
- Use self-distancing language: for e.g, instead of thinking “what should I do”, think “what should you do”/“what should [your name] do”.
- Try to see things from someone else’s viewpoint, or you can try to see things from a generalized external perspective.
- Become aware of your innate tendency to focus on yourself.
RELATED IDEAS
Since we spend the majority of the time experiencing things from our own perspective, we struggle to imagine the perspective of others.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for people to account for the fact that other people’s thoughts, beliefs, and views are different from their own.
A cognitive bias that causes people to mistakenly believe that one party’s gains are directly balanced by other parties’ losses.
This bias encourages belief in an antagonistic nature of social relationships
For example, the zero-sum bias can cause people to think that there is competition for a resource that they feel is limited, in situations where the resource in question is actually unlimited and freely available.
For example, you could choose to openly display social proof or bandwagon cues, in order to signal to other people that there is support for whatever it is you are promoting.
Video-sharing sites demonstrate the benefits of displaying these cues, since people often use popularity cues such as the number of views that a video has in order to decide whether to watch it or not.