The Majority Fallacy Reconsidered

Abstract

The so-called majority fallacy implies that deviant norms and behaviours are attributed to a majority when this is in fact not justified Based on the fallacy, a fictitious norm pressure develops In particular, young people in loosely integrated groups are thought to be at nsk The importance of friendships and of own and friends norms in respect of drug-use development was investigated in a longitudinal study of Norwegian adolescents. Contrary to theory, friendships were found to be positively correlated with drug use. The reason may be that, at an experimental and recreational level, drug use is typically a collective, social activity The findings were more ambiguous regarding the significance of friends' norms The respondents assessed their friends' norms as more non-conformist than their own, but the perception of friends' norms did not explain future drug use, while own norms did. In addition to the majority fallacy, the following two pnnciples are suggested to help explain this finding. 'false consensus', which implies that own norms and experiences are regarded as more common m the reference groups than is warranted, and 'asymmetric ties', which implies that certain individuals with more deviant norms than average are to be found in many people's reference groups. The conclusion is therefore that the majority fallacy concept may represent an over implification of these situations, and that the causal significance of the principle has been overestimated.