It happens all the time. Whenever you hear "I can't even imagine why someone would do that!", stop and ask whether it's really that hard to imagine. Usually it isn't.
However, imagine if the typical mind fallacy was correct. The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?"
To be honest, this is a perfect example of what is so off-putting about this community. This method is simply socially wrong - it works against both the people who stole, and people who had something stolen from, who get penalized for the honest answer and, if such methods are to be more widely employed, are now inclined to second-guess and say "no, I don't think anyone steals" (and yes, this method is employed to some extent, subconsciously at least). The idea parasitizes on the social contract that is human language, with the honest naivete of the asocial. It's as if a Dutch town was building a dike and someone was suggesting that anyone who needs materials for repairing the house should just take them from that weird pile in the sea. The only reason such method can work, is because others have been losing a little here and there to maintain some trust necessary for effective communication.
Real-life employment personality questionnaires are more subtle than this. They might ask things like, "Nobody could resist buying a stolen item they wanted if the price was low enough: Agree/DIsagree", or "Wanting to steal something is a natural human reaction if a person is treated unfairly: Agree/Disagree".
That is, they test for thieves' typical rationalizations, rather than asking straight-up factual questions. Xachariah's example question isn't a good use of typical-mind fallacy, because it doesn't ask a purely theory-of-mind question.
Real personality tests don't ask how likely someone is to steal, they ask (in effect), how justified they think someone else would be in stealing. The more things you consider justifiable reasons for stealing, the greater the odds you'll personally find one. ;-)
In any event, they do exploit the typical mind fallacy, they just do so directly, by asking about what people think other people think, from the perspective of a potential thief. If a person is honest, then they must disagree that "nobody could resist", because they are a strong example of somebody who could, whereas the thief thinks that everyone else is just like them, and has motivated-cognition reasons for wanting to agree.
Actually, that's Yvain's post, not mine...
As I'm wont to do, I was thinking about how to make that theory pay rent. It occurred to me that this could definitely be exploitable. If the typical mind fallacy is correct, we should be able to have it go the other way; we can derive information about a person's proclivities based on what they think about other people.
Yep! This is actually a standard method: ask people to estimate what they think other people do. A version of this is the 'Bayesian truth serum' trick.
Great insight! Unsurprisingly, you're not the first. To my knowledge though, this method doesn't have a standard name and isn't prevalent. Predictions about others might give more information, but are still manipulable and hard to interpret when comparing respondents to each other. Did this person say lots of others cheat because they cheat or because they are bad with probabilities?
Alternatively, if you have a question with a single underlying answer, predictions about opinions are potentially useful for filtering out bias. This is the idea behind Prelec'...
See http://measureofdoubt.com/2011/06/16/bayesian-truth-serum/
Also, a "rent-paying" belief in EY's sense does not necessarily give rise to useful applications, it just has observational consequences, i.e. predicts something different than its negation.
This wouldn't reward people who don't steal because they don't want to, but only those so naive that the thought of stealing doesn't occur to them.
I'm not too comfortable with the idea of rewarding ignorance and punishing cynicism.
An example of this used as a textbook signal for abusive relationships is that people who frequently accuse partners of being unfaithful without evidence are generally those who are cheating themselves or have cheated in the past.
This seems like a ridiculously transparent move. If I knew no psychological theory whatsoever, it would still be obvious that "What do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" is a question primarily designed to test how likely I am to steal (and also possibly testing how likely I am to trust other employees at my future job).
I would try to figure out the lowest number I can write down without it being obvious that it's the lowest number I can write down. Of course I am still going off of my experience here to estimate what sort of numbers are low. But at that point you are rewarding people for being good at lying.
I remember reading a livejournal post by a guy (diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome) about coming up against these kind of questions in job interviews. The explanation on that post is that people who have imaginary peer pressure against stealing are less likely to steal.
...Eg, most employers ask "have you ever stolen from a job before," and have to deal with misreporting because nobody in their right mind will say yes. However, imagine if the typical mind fallacy was correct. The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" and know that the applicants who responded higher than average were correspondingly more likely to steal, and the applicants who responded lower than average were less likely to cheat. It could cut through all sorts
I'd be surprised if professional personality tests and sociologists aren't using these types of questions.
I believe it was mentioned in on of my psychology courses' modules on questionnaire design, but I can't remember what if any technical name it had.
I remember reading that this effect is indeed used on real employment tests, but I don't remember where or if it was an authoritative source.
I've had questions like this: "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Most people have stolen something during their adult lives".
I might be remembering this wrong, but I read somewhere that if you want to get someone's opinion about something, you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. The reasoning was that people will quite obviously try to guess your password if you ask them a question directly, but their close friends are much more likely to be closer to their true opinion than they let on, so you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. I can't find where I read this at so take it with a grain of salt (anyone with better Google-fu able to find what I'm talking about?).
If true, this would seem to be a not-as-fallacious application of the typical mind fallacy.
The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" and know that the applicants who responded higher than average were correspondingly more likely to steal, and the applicants who responded lower than average were less likely to cheat. It could cut through all sorts of social desirability distortion effects.
I would suggest that an answer to "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen.." is a proxy question for, "just exactly how socially unacceptable to you is stealing from your employer"? It relates to, basically, your own levels of altruism, and what you perceive the local altruism levels to be. If you see that everyone around you is being altruistic, you feel a basic urge to keep the clean environment up, while if everyone around you is cheating, then you are less likely to keep up your own altruism.
I've had my bike...
It might get a bit suspicious if you are entirely asking people about what other people think. You'd have to mix it with more conventional "dummy" questions.
Assuming, of course, that this hypothesis is true. The great thing is that it's easily testable.
This seems like a ridiculously transparent move. If I knew no psychological theory whatsoever, it would still be obvious that "What do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" is a question primarily designed to test how likely I am to steal (and also possibly testing how likely I am to trust other employees at my future job).
I would try to figure out the lowest number I can write down without it being obvious that it's the lowest number I can write down. Of course I am still going off of my experience here to estimate what sort of numbers are low. But at that point you are rewarding people for being good at lying.
I think negative 12% of all employees steal.
I was reading Yvain's Generalizing from One Example, which talks about the typical mind fallacy. Basically, it describes how humans assume that all other humans are like them. If a person doesn't cheat on tests, they are more likely to assume others won't cheat on tests either. If a person sees mental images, they'll be more likely to assume that everyone else sees mental images.
As I'm wont to do, I was thinking about how to make that theory pay rent. It occurred to me that this could definitely be exploitable. If the typical mind fallacy is correct, we should be able to have it go the other way; we can derive information about a person's proclivities based on what they think about other people.
Eg, most employers ask "have you ever stolen from a job before," and have to deal with misreporting because nobody in their right mind will say yes. However, imagine if the typical mind fallacy was correct. The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" and know that the applicants who responded higher than average were correspondingly more likely to steal, and the applicants who responded lower than average were less likely to cheat. It could cut through all sorts of social desirability distortion effects. You couldn't get the exact likelihood, but it would give more useful information than you would get with a direct question.
In hindsight, which is always 20/20, it seems incredibly obvious. I'd be surprised if professional personality tests and sociologists aren't using these types of questions. My google-fu shows no hits, but it's possible I'm just not using the correct term that sociologists use. I'm was wondering if anyone had heard of this questioning method before, and if there's any good research data out there showing just how much you can infer from someone's deviance from the median response.