In 1977, psychologists Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House conducted a series of experiments that revealed a persistent bias: people systematically overestimate the extent to which their own opinions, values, and behaviors are typical of those around them. In one classic experiment, participants were asked to walk around campus wearing a large sandwich board sign—some agreed, while others refused. Both groups were convinced that the majority of other people would do the same as they did. To both groups, reality felt like an extension of their own point of view.
The mechanism behind this effect is quite simple: each of us has far more accessible information about our own thoughts, feelings, and motives than about those of others. When we estimate what others "typically" or "normally" think, we inevitably use ourselves as the most readily available benchmark—and quietly mistake our own perspective for a representative sample, which it truly is not.
In organizations, this is especially noticeable at the leadership level. A manager who personally considers remote work the norm genuinely believes that the team feels the same way—and is surprised by low survey scores regarding the desire to be in the office more often. A leader for whom salary is not the primary motivator underestimates how strongly the topic of compensation matters to employees with different life circumstances.
Top management, feeling comfortable with the current pace of change within the company, genuinely does not anticipate a high level of change fatigue among the rest of the staff.
The danger lies in the fact that this distortion does not feel like a bias from within—it feels like common sense.
Leaders do not feel that they are projecting their stance onto everyone; they feel they are simply seeing what is obvious. This is precisely why real data—survey results, interviews, bottom-up feedback—regularly turns out to be an unpleasant surprise: it conflicts not with the manager's conscious opinion of the team, but with their unconscious assumption that the team thinks like them.
What helps:
treating your own intuition about "what people think" as a hypothesis rather than a fact—and systematically testing it, instead of relying on an internal sense of obviousness;
gathering feedback before making a decision rather than after, so that data can adjust the stance rather than merely validate it in hindsight;
purposefully seeking out the voices of people with different life experiences from those who make the decisions—that is precisely where the gap between "it seems to me" and reality is usually the widest.