This research explores how marketing managers can avoid the so-called false consensus effect—the egocentric tendency to project personal preferences onto consumers. Two pilot studies were conducted to provide evidence for the managerial importance of this research question and to explore how marketing managers attempt to avoid false consensus effects in practice. The results suggest that the debiasing tactic most frequently used by marketers is to suppress their personal preferences when predicting consumer preferences. Four subsequent studies show that, ironically, this debiasing tactic can backfire and increase managers’ susceptibility to the false consensus effect. Specifically, the results suggest that these backfire effects are most likely to occur for managers with a low level of preference certainty. In contrast, the results imply that preference suppression does not backfire but instead decreases false consensus effects for managers with a high level of preference certainty. Finally, the studies explore the mechanism behind these results and show how managers can ultimately avoid false consensus effects—regardless of their level of preference certainty and without risking backfire effects.

这项研究探索了营销经理如何避免所谓的虚假共识效应，即以个人为中心向消费者投射个人偏好的趋势。进行了两项试点研究，以提供证据证明该研究问题的管理重要性，并探讨营销经理如何在实践中避免错误的共识效应。结果表明，营销人员最常用的去偏策略是在预测消费者的偏好时抑制其个人偏好。后来的四项研究表明，具有讽刺意味的是，这种偏见性策略会适得其反并增加管理者对虚假共识效应的敏感性。具体而言，结果表明，对于偏好确定性较低的管理人员，最有可能发生这些事与愿违的后果。相反，结果表明，偏好抑制不会适得其反，而是会降低具有较高偏好确定性的管理者的错误共识效应。最后，研究探索了这些结果背后的机制，并显示了管理者如何能够最终避免错误的共识效应-无论他们的偏好确定性水平如何，而又不会冒适得其反的风险。