If you assume that you understand why you think and act the way you do, you're probably wrong.
Decades of psychological research suggest that people behave in ways that are mysterious and perplexing — even to themselves.
We sifted through the Quora thread, "What are some mind-blowing facts about social psychology?" and pulled out the most fascinating findings. (Some fall outside the realms of social psychology, but we thought they were worth including.)
Read on to find out why we label other people jerks and ourselves victims of circumstance; why powerful people are messier eaters; and why we're harder on others than on ourselves.
1. We often subscribe to the majority opinion, even when it's obvious the majority is wrong
"People often go to surprising lengths to conform to the majority opinion,"writes Quora user Leo Polovets, referring to an experiment conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch.
Back in the 1950s, Asch designed an experiment in which participants saw three lines and were asked to say which one was longest. One line was clearly longer than the others.
In each iteration of the experiment, just one participant was surrounded by a group of confederates, who all reported that one of the shorter lines was longest. Sure enough, three-quarters of participants agreed with the rest of the group at least once.
In 2005, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns replicated the experiment and found similar results. Berns also scanned participants' brains while the experiment was going on and determined that group pressure actually caused people to change their perception of reality, while disagreeing with the group caused people to experience emotional discomfort.
2. We don't always realize that the environment has a huge impact on our behavior
In countries where drivers' licenses have an opt-out box for organ donation, the rate of consent is significantly higher than in countries where there's an opt-in box, according to research.
"Making a decision is difficult so often times people resort to the default option,"says Christopher Lee.
3. We incorrectly assume that most people support common behavior
One way to explain this phenomenon, writes Anunay Arunav, is, "when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes." In other words, individual members of a group privately believe one thing, but think that everyone else in the group believes the opposite.
This phenomenon can help explain why certain cultural practices and government policies persist long after support for them has waned.
The term was coined in 1931 by psychologists Daniel Katz and Floyd Allport, when they discovered that most college students didn't support racial segregation, but were convinced that their classmates did.
More recently, researchers asked college students about their attitudes toward alcohol use and their estimates of their peers' attitudes. Most students believed they were more uncomfortable with alcohol use on campus than the average student.
See the rest of the story at Tech Insider