Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective or to have a higher opinion of oneself than reality. It has been linked to psychological motivations related to self-enhancement and has been shown to influence memory processes. Empirical studies have demonstrated that information consistent with an individual's existing beliefs, experiences, or self-concept is more readily recalled, contributing to an egocentric outlook. Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly first identified this cognitive bias in their 1979 paper, "Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution". Egocentric bias is referred to by most psychologists as a general umbrella term under which other related phenomena fall.
The effects of egocentric bias can differ based on personal characteristics, such as age and the number of languages one speaks. Thus far, there have been many studies focusing on specific implications of egocentric bias in different contexts. Research on collaborative group tasks have emphasized that people view their own contributions differently than they view that of others. Other areas of research have been aimed at studying how mental health patients display egocentric bias, and at the relationship between egocentric bias and voter distribution. These types of studies surrounding egocentric bias usually involve written or verbal questionnaires, based on the subject's personal life or their decision in various hypothetical scenarios.
History and analysis The term "egocentric bias" was first coined in 1980 by Anthony Greenwald, a psychologist at The Ohio State University. He described it as a phenomenon in which people skew their beliefs so that what they recall from their memory or what they initially understood is different than what actually occurred. He cites research by Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker, who explain that the self-reference effect is the ability of people to recall information better if they think about how the information will affect them during the encoding process (recording memories in their brain). Greenwald argues that the self-reference effect causes people to exaggerate their role in a situation. Furthermore, information is better encoded, and thus people are more likely to suffer from egocentric bias, if they produce information actively rather than passively, such as by having a direct role in the outcome of a situation.
Egocentric bias occurs when people fail to consider situations from other people's perspectives. Egocentric bias has influenced ethical judgements to the point where people not only believe that self-interested outcomes are preferential but are also the morally sound way to proceed. People are more inclined to be aware of their own behaviors since they can use their thoughts and emotions to gain more information about themselves. These thoughts and emotions can affect how people view themselves in relation to others in specific situations. A common example arises when people are asked to explain how much credit should be given to each person in a collaborative project. Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard University, considers egocentric bias as one of the "seven sins" of memory and essentially reflects the prominent role played by the self when encoding and retrieving episodic memories. As such, people often feel that their contributions to a collaborative project are greater than those of other members, since people tend to focus more on how much they have done.
In social context, egocentric bias influences people to choose a social circle that is capable of maintaining one's positive traits. Studies show that one's choice of friend or social circle is likely to be dependent on the amount of positive feedback received.
Examples In a 1993 study conducted in Japan, subjects were asked to write down fair or unfair behaviors that they themselves or others did. When writing about fair behavior, they tended to start with the word "I" rather than "others". Likewise, they began unfair behaviors with "others" rather than "I". This demonstrates that people tend to attribute successes and positive behaviors to themselves, while placing the burden of failures and negative behaviors on others. Furthermore, in this study there were gender differences detected; Japanese women, compared to men, remembered the behaviors of others more than their own, and were also more likely to attribute fair or unfair behavior to others than to themselves.
Another study found that egocentric bias influences perceived fairness. Subjects felt that overpayment to themselves were more fair than overpayment to others; by contrast, they felt the underpayment to themselves were less fair than underpayment to others. Greenberg's studies showed that this egocentrism was eliminated when the subjects were put in a self-aware state, which was applied in his study with a mirror being placed in front of the subjects. When a person is not self-aware, they perceive that something can be fair to them but not necessarily fair to others. Therefore, fairness was something biased and subjective. When a person is self-aware, there is a uniform standard of fairness and there is no bias. When made self-aware, subjects rated overpayment and underpayment to both themselves and to others as equally unfair. It is believed that these results were obtained because self-awareness elevated subjects' concerns about perceived fairness in payment, thereby overriding egocentric tendencies.
The egocentric bias can also be clearly observed in young children, especially those who have not yet developed theory of mind, or the ability to understand concrete situations from the perspective of others. In one study by Wimmer and Perner, a child and a stuffed animal were presented with two differently colored boxes and both are shown that one contains an object of interest. The experimenter then removed the stuffed animal from the room and moved the object into the other box. When asked where the stuffed animal should search for the object, the children overwhelmingly tended to point to the box that they knew the object was in. Rather than thinking about the animal's perspective, the children displayed an egocentric bias in assuming that the animal would share their point of view, even though the animal had no way of knowing the same information as them.
Causes The causes and motivations for egocentric bias were investigated in a 1983 journal entry by Brian Mullen of Murray State University. Inspired by the study by Ross et al. demonstrating the false consensus effect, Mullen's paper focused on the overestimation of consensus. Mullen analyzed the NBC television show "Play the Percentages" to determine whether egocentric bias was rooted in a perceptual and unintentional distortion of reality versus a conscious, intentional motivation to appear normalized. Subjects in this analysis were contestants from the show, 20–30 year old middle class married couple with equal gender distribution. At the start of each show, studio audiences were asked several trivia questions, and the percentage of correct answers was recorded for later use in the game. During each round of the game, opposing contestants estimated the percentage of correct answers. The contestant who had a closer estimate wins the percentage of correct answer as a score, and then if they answer said trivia question correctly, wins the remaining percentage for a maximum possible 100 points. The first couple to win 300 points received a cash prize, with the opportunity to win more prizes in bonus rounds. Thus, the show provided incentive for unbiased estimates of consensus. Statistical analysis of the collected data showed that the "egocentric bias of false consensus was observed in spite of the potent incentive for unbiased estimates of consensus." This analysis ultimately supports the hypothesis that egocentric bias is a result of unintentional perceptual distortion of reality rather than a conscious, intentional motivation to appear normalized.
From a psychological standpoint, memories appear to be stored in the brain in an egocentric manner: the role of oneself is magnified in one's experiences to make them more personally relevant and thereby easier to recall. Early childhood memories, therefore, may be more difficult to recall since one's sense of self is less developed, so old memories do not connect as strongly to oneself as newer ones. Moreover, egocentric bias may have evolved from hunter-gatherer times, in which communities were small and interdependent enough that individuals could assume that others around them had very similar outlooks. An egocentric view would have reduced cognitive load and increased communication efficiency.
Effects of personal characteristics
Age A 2016 study published by Riva, Triscoli, Lamm, Carnaghi, and Silani found that egocentric bias tends to be experienced in a much greater degree by adolescents and older adults than by young and middle aged adults. They examined the emotional effect of visuo-tactile stimulation on pairs of participants from a population of 114 female of varying ages. The varying degree of egocentric bias with age was attributed to the developmental cycle of the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) of the parietal lobe, which finishes developing at the end of adolescence and decays early.
Bilingualism Recent studies of egocentric bias have been done in many different subgroups of people, such as bilingual people. A study done by Paula Rubio-Fernández and Sam Glucksberg found that bilingual people are less prone to egocentric bias because they have grown to pay more attention to others' thoughts. Thus, it is less difficult for them to differentiate between their own opinions and those of others.
Related phenomena
False-consensus effect
Considered to be a facet of egocentric bias, the false-consensus effect states that people believe their thoughts, actions, and opinions are much more common than they are in reality. When people are asked to make an estimate of a population's statistic, they often only have data from themselves and tend to assume that others in the population are similar to them due to egocentric bias. In turn, people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinion is shared by the rest of the population. Moreover, people tend to believe that those who differ in opinion must be part of a minority and that the majority actually agrees with them. Therefore, the false-consensus effect, or the tendency to deduce judgements from one's own opinions, is a direct result of egocentric bias.
A well known example of false-consensus effect is a study published by Ross, Greene and House in 1977. Students are asked to walk around a campus with a sandwich board that bearing the word "repent". People who agreed to do so (50%) estimated that most of their peers would also agree to do so (average estimation 63.5%). Conversely, those who refused to do the experiment reported that most of their peers would refuse as well.