Egocentrism is the inability to take someone else’s perspective other than your own. There is another part to egocentrism which is people’s inferences about what others know. One “predictor” of what someone might know, is their social categories – e.g. doctor, teacher, oil driller, parent, etc. As humans, we tend to stereotype people and their knowledge about things, by what their occupation is. We may feel that we are either smarter or they are smarter according to a career (Fussell & Krauss, 1991).
To make the process of assessing others knowledge easier for ourselves, we rely on inference processes. One bias that we fall on, is the “false consensus” effect. Fussell and Krauss (1991) define the “false consensus” as when we assume others to be more similar to ourselves than is the actual case. To test this idea, Nickerson, Baddeley and Freeman (1987) conducted a study examining how many students would answer a general knowledge question and if they were biased by whether or not they answered the question correctly. Their results showed accuracy if both people had the same level of knowledge. However, if the knowledge levels differed, their accuracy was off. This study can be compared to the study mentioned earlier by Kruger, et al.(2005), in which he conducted studies to see if participants would overestimate their abilities to communicate over e-mail. The participants overestimated their ability by over 15%. Both studies showed similar results and tried to convey the same general idea that people tend to be egocentric and/or overconfident when it comes to communicating over the internet.
Egocentrism can carry over onto the internet from "real world" applications. Because of this, as consumers of the internet, we must be careful while communicating. Overestimating your ability to communicate over the internet can lead to problems, and even lead to interpersonal issues. Next time you decide to communicate over the internet, take a moment to think about how you may be being biased towards your recipient and how you can communicate more efficiently.