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.
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 que... (read more)