The fundamental attribution error could cause a person who witnessed wrongdoing to conclude that the actor usually does wrong, whereas the correct conclusion in most cases is that the actor occasionally lapses.Moral pessimism could also result from a tendency to believe that the behavior of others is instrumentally driven. The overestimation of unethical behavior could follow from a common belief that one’s self interest is the most important factor in explaining the behavior of individuals in the society.A wrongdoer may protect his self-esteem by exaggerating how frequently others commit the same wrong.Relevant concepts invoked by psychologists include social validation, self- enhancing biases, and constructive social comparison.Now we turn from moral pessimism to social projection. An individual who projects his own behavior onto society overestimates how many others behave like he does.This bias is closely related to what the psychology literature calls the false consensus effect , which refers to a situation where people mistakenly think that others agree with them. According to the FCE, people tend to overestimate the social support of their own views and underestimate the social support for people who hold opposing views.Evidence from four studies in the original research by Ross demonstrates that social observers tend to form a false consensus with respect to the relative commonness of their own behavior. These results were obtained in questionnaires that presented subjects with hypothetical situations and also in actual conflicts that presented subjects with choices. Several psychological mechanisms could cause social projection. One such mechanism is cognitive: A person may attend to positions with which he agrees and dismiss positions with which he disagrees.Selective attention allows his preferred position to dominate his consciousness.
The sorting of people reinforces selective attention. People tend to associate with others who share their general beliefs, attitudes, and values. The association could be voluntary as when people select their friends,indoor cannabis growing or involuntary as when people are involuntarily segregated. If likes associate with likes, then recalling instances of behavior like your own will be easier than recalling behavior unlike your own.Instead of cognition, emotion could cause social projection. Perhaps people need for people to see their own acts, beliefs, and feelings as morally appropriate.Finding similarity between oneself and others may validate the appropriateness of behavior, sustain self-esteem, restore cognitive balance, enhance perceived social support, or reduce anticipated social tensions.Later we discuss the possibility that emotional bias resists correction by fresh information that ameliorates cognitive bias. We will construct an economic model of conformity to a social norm, solve for the equilibrium, introduce perceptual bias into the model, and see how the equilibrium changes. We follow the economic tradition of distinguishing between benefits and costs. A person who breaks a norm often enjoys various benefits, such as the financial gain from disclosing trade secrets, the reduction in taxes from evading them, the pleasure of listening to music after downloading it illegally, victory from winning a contest by cheating, time saved by not complying with law, etc. Assume that each actor’s benefit from breaking the norm can be measured. The metric may be utility, pleasure, income, time, prestige, power, comfort, etc. In Figure 1, the vertical axis measures the amount a person benefits from breaking the norm. Each person i has a type i, reflecting the benefits he obtains from breaking the norm. The horizontal axis depicts the cumulative proportion of people who enjoy a benefit of a given amount. According to the curve in Figure 1, a small number of people enjoy a high benefit, and a large number of people enjoy at least a small price. We connect the benefit from breaking a social norm to standard economic concepts. A person’s benefit in economics is described as his “willingness to pay”. The curve in Figure 1 thus depicts willingness to pay for wrongdoing in a population of people. The number of people who are willing to pay a certain amount also measures demand.
The curve in Figure 1thus depicts the “demand” for wrongdoing. The demand curve slopes down because more people are willing to pay the price of wrongdoing as it decreases. Now we turn from the individual’s benefits to his costs. Breaking a social norm often provokes social sanctions that can take various forms.38 First, people who break the norm could lose the social approval of their peers. Second, they could face social resentment. Third, they might have trouble finding business partners. Fourth, if the social norm is also a law, the wrongdoer might suffer civil liability or criminal punishment. Fifth, they might suffer in some of all of these ways because they acquire a bad reputation. The vertical axis in Figure 2 indicates the individual actor’s cost of breaking the social norm, and the horizontal axis indicates the proportion of wrongdoers who break the norm. As depicted in Figure 2, the individual actor’s cost of breaking the norm decreases as the proportion of wrongdoers increases. Various reasons could explain why breaking a norm costs less when many others do it. A simple reason that is central to the enforcement of norms concerns the expected sanction. The expected sanction equals its probability multiplied by its severity. As discussed above, the probability that a particular wrongdoer will suffer a social or legal sanction often decreases as more people commit the sanctioned act. For example, when people see many others smoking in airports, they feel more confident that they will not be confronted if they smoke. Because safety lies in numbers, the cost curve slopes down in Figure 2. The curve in Figure 2 also describes the “supply of sanctions for wrongdoing” as a function of the proportion of wrongdoers. One of this article’s authors gave questionnaires to engineers in Silicon Valley concerning trade secrets. The questionnaires asked each person whether or not he would violate trade secrets law,cannabis grow supplies and then asked the frequency with which he thought that other people violated trade secrets laws. 44.8%of the participants in the study said that they were more likely than not to violate trade secrets law, but they estimated on average that 57% of the employees in their company would violate trade secrets law. When asked about the proportion of employees in Silicon Valley in general who would violate the trade secrets law, the average answer was 68%. Pessimism bias would produce such a gap in results.45 Our model predicts that moral pessimism bias would lower the perceived cost of disclosing trade secrets. In terms of Figure 5, the perceived cost curve lies below the actual cost curve.
Consequently, moral pessimism bias causes more disclosure of trade secrets. Equivalently, fewer people would disclose trade secrets laws if they knew the true level of illegal disclosure. In these circumstances, accurate reporting of the frequency of norm violations should cause fewer of them. The effect of accurate reporting is presumably stronger when cognitive processes cause bias, and the effect is presumably weaker when motivational processes cause bias. The survey also found that the longer a worker spends in Silicon Valley, the more he feels justified in disclosing trade secret. Perhaps people change their beliefs to align with their misperception of the facts — they accept the morality of the actual as they misperceive it.The gap between self-reported and perceived disclosures of trade secrets differed systematically across types of people. Those who reported that they were more likely to disclose secrets estimated that a relatively high percentage of other people disclose secrets, and those who reported that they were less likely to disclose secrets estimated that a relatively low percentage of other people disclose secrets. Social projection would produce these results. Our model predicts that social projection would not cause more people to disclose trade secrets. Consequently, providing information to correct the bias will not change the number of people who disclose trade secrets. Social projection, however, might cause those people who disclose trade secrets to do so more often. In addition, social projection increases the resolve of people who disclose trade secrets; so increasing the severity of the punishment will be less effective in deterring them. Psychologists have investigated the connection between the willingness of people to pay taxes and their perception of tax evasion by other. A study of Australian taxpayers found a discrepancy between what the individual does and what he thinks others are doing. Moral pessimism bias would produce the observed discrepancy.According to our model, moral pessimism will cause fewer taxpayers to comply with the law. A longitudinal study of Australian citizens that used a cross-lagged panel analysis found that taxpayers’ personal views of the morality of tax compliance affect their perception of the levels of tax compliance by others.. Those with high personal standards of tax compliance perceived relatively more compliance by others, and those with low personal standards perceived relatively less tax compliance by others. These results are consistent with social projection bias. According to our model, social projection bias will not affect the number of taxpayers who comply with the law, but it may cause tax avoiders and evaders to comply less, and it should make all taxpayers more reluctant to change their behavior. This study show how people respond to information exposing their biases. Researchers were able to monitor people’s actual tax files. Some sub-groups were given information about the gap between their own behavior and the behavior of others. Receiving information on the behavior of others caused more tax compliance in some forms, such as the amount of deduction claimed. This fact is consistent with our prediction that disseminating accurate information will cause more right doing when actors suffer from moral pessimism bias.The actor’s perceived cost of heavy drinking, consequently, is less than its actual cost. Since the perceived cost curve lies below the actual cost curve, as in Figure 5, our model predicts more heavy drinking than would occur if students perceived costs accurately. One of the studies tracked how attitudes developed over the course of two months among college freshmen and discovered gender differences. Male students adjusted their personal attitudes over time to match more closely the perceived consensus. After the adjustment, actual attitudes among males were closer to perceived attitudes. In terms of Figure 5, the actual cost curve shifted closer to the perceived cost curve. These facts suggest that providing information to correct misperception at the beginning of the semester would reduce heavy drinking more than if the information were provided at the end of the semester. With female students, attitudes remained stable, so the timing of the information should make less difference to their behavior.Given multiple equilibria as in Figure 3, the initial proportion of wrongdoers can affect the equilibrium. In Figure 3, an initial proportion of wrongdoers below x2 will cause their numbers to fall approximately to zero, whereas an initial proportion of wrongdoers above x2 will cause their numbers to rise to x1. Perhaps more male students drink heavily when they arrive as freshmen, which causes the system to settle at a high level of drinking among males. Conversely, perhaps fewer female students drink heavily when they arrive as freshman, which causes the system to settle at a low level of drinking among females. These hypotheses require testing. Now we turn to studies on drug use. In a classical study, a sample of adolescents was divided into three groups: nonusers, cannabis-users, and cannabis and amphetamine users.The perceptions of members of the three groups differed significantly from each other.Compared to nonusers, drug-users gave relatively high estimates of the number of users. These results are consistent with social projection. Researcher proposed two psychological causes of projection. First, the number of arguments that we hear for or against something affects our attitudes towards it and we hear more arguments from people inside our group than from outsiders. Accurate information should help to correct this cognitive bias. Second, the members of each group were motivated to see their own behavior in others. Accurate information is probably not enough to correct this emotional bias. The authors concluded that projection bias would cause over-use of drugs, which contradicts our model. Our model does predict that projection bias will entrench existing behavior among the three groups of people and make it harder to change.