False Consensus Effect
Why we assume others think like us and how to use the false consensus effect to improve your marketing decisions.
In this issue
Hey 👋 The Crew here.
Checking your phone first thing in the morning is like eating dessert for breakfast.
Sure, it feels good. All that dopamine, all those notifications. But deep down, you know you’re starting the day backwards. Our brain deserves better than a scroll before coffee.
Unless you’re scrolling this newsletter, of course.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 48 seconds
SOC 2 have you shivering? Sleigh it with Delve’s AI.
Delve’s Copilot reads your policies, completes privacy tasks, fills SOC 2 evidence, and navigates your workflow from start to finish.
Everything gets done for you automatically, without the manual grind that usually slows teams down. It extracts the right information, completes the forms you would normally struggle through, and moves each task forward without you lifting a finger.
The result is a smoother, faster, and more reliable compliance process that stays on track even during your busiest season. Teams using Delve are seeing real outcomes.
- Lovable achieved SOC 2 in 20 hours.
- Wisprflow closed Mercury and Superhuman in one month.
- 11x unlocked 1.2 million dollars in ARR.
If Santa has elves, you have Copilot working in the background and keeping you confidently compliant.
Brace yourself for an oddly specific question:
Would you walk around your city for 30 minutes wearing a sandwich board that says “Eat at Joe’s?”
In 1977, Stanford researcher Lee Ross asked students this exact question.
The results were telling:
- Of those who agreed to wear the sign, 61.4% believed others would also agree.
- Of those who refused, 70% believed others would also refuse.
Both groups thought their decision was the majority view. Both groups were wrong.
We call this the False Consensus Effect, a tendency to overestimate how much other people agree with us, think like us, and behave like us. Sounds familiar, Redditors?
We default to the idea that our personal beliefs and preferences are the “norm.”
If you love espresso, you assume most people enjoy bitter coffee. If you hate pop-up ads, you assume they don’t work on anyone.
This happens because our own experiences are the most “available” data we have. We project them onto the world to feel normal.
Why you should care: You are not your customer. If you build campaigns based on what you like, you are betting your budget on a sample size of one.
Let’s see how to fix that.
Three ways to leverage False Consensus Effect
Replace “I think” with “the data says”
The most dangerous phrase in marketing meetings? “I wouldn’t do that.” Or “I wouldn’t click that.”
The truth is often bitter. It doesn’t matter what you would do. It matters what the user does.
To beat this bias, you must separate your intuition from your strategy.
You probably know a bunch of websites whose UI looks like something out of the early 2010s , but they somehow work. Same with those raw, low-quality ads that seem to perform best.
Take Booking’s UI. It doesn’t scream 2026, that’s for sure:
Their pages are often cluttered, full of urgency triggers, and bright colors. A minimal designer might hate it. But Booking.com runs thousands of A/B tests and this always wins.
There’s no guessing; they let the user behavior dictate the design.
If the data says “ugly” converts, you go with ugly.
Fight the “Curse of Knowledge” in your copy
Remember when we talked about the Curse of Knowledge? It’s good to revisit it now, as it is closely tied to the Fake Consensus Effect.
In a nutshell: Because you understand your product perfectly, you assume your audience does too. This leads to copy full of jargon, acronyms, and complex features that fly over the customer’s head.
You assume a “consensus” of understanding that doesn’t exist.
Loom could have marketed themselves as “asynchronous video messaging software.” Technically, that’s accurate. But it sounds like a chore to learn.
Instead, they focused on the pain point everyone understands—send a video instead of writing essays.
They bridged the gap between their tech and your reality.
Cast a narrower net
Since we think everyone thinks like us, we often try to market to “everyone.”
But if you try to please everyone, you end up boring everyone. Sounds familiar? A better strategy is to accept that consensus is a myth, and lean into polarization.
One example you’d probably know? Liquid Death water.
They sell water in a can that looks like beer, with aggressive, heavy-metal branding.
They know grandmas probably won’t buy it. They know some people will think it’s stupid. And they don’t care.
They ignored a broad consensus and built a cult following among the people who get the joke.
AI EDUCATION: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney… So many names, but what’s actually useful for you in your work? There’s a newsletter called The Deep View that exists to sift through all the noise and get you up to speed on what’s actionable with AI products, and it’s free. Join 512,000+ subscribers with one click and let AI empower you.*
AI TACTICS: Struggling to find a practical use for AI in your marketing work? No worries. Every Saturday, we will send you a free newsletter to sharpen your marketing skills and get more wins for yourself and your clients, including the latest AI use cases with actual examples and prompts you can just swipe. Subscribe for free.*
FACEBOOK: …is streamlining its entire user experience. Which means cleaner Feed, simplified content creation tools, and a navigation that puts the most-used features front and center. Sounds like less clutter and more visibility, which should be good. In theory.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Research from Ampere shows the 55-64 age bracket is driving the highest
YouTube traffic growth, up 20% in the US and 14% in the UK since 2020. While TikTok saw a 16% rise in British users in this demographic over the past year. New targeting option?
MARKETING: Offering small discounts? Try making it a gambling game. Research finds that when a guaranteed discount is shown as a percentage or a small fixed amount, it feels safe but unexciting. And an uncertain discount triggers our optimism. Marketing and dopamine hits, eh?
YOUTUBE: Short and sweet. Creator Ads on Shorts are increasing purchase intent by 8.8% and driving 2.9x more consumer intent to spend versus competitors, YouTube reports. New features like linking directly to your website makes it easier to do this, too. Good to know.
ICYMI, last time we looked at Mental Accounting.
The “Echo chamber” Crew
*This is a sponsored post.
Get the next psychology effect in your inbox.
Receive cutting-edge, science-driven marketing insights and tips every Thursday, for free.
