MIT professor of psychology and cognitive science Drazen Pelec calls this trick “Bayesian truth serum,” according to Tyler Cowen in Discover Your Inner Economist. The logic behind it is simple: our impressions of “typical” attitudes and behavior are colored by our own attitudes and behavior. And that’s reasonable. You should count yourself as one data point in your sample of “how people think and behave.”
Your own data is likely to influence your sample more strongly than other data points, however, for two reasons. First, because it’s much more salient to you, compared to your data about other people, so you’re more likely to overweight it in your estimation. And second, through a ripple effect — people tend to cluster with other people who think and act similarly to themselves, so however your sample differs from the general population, that’s an indicator of how you yourself differ from the general population.
So, to use Cowen’s example, if you ask a man how many sexual partners he’s had, he might have a strong incentive to lie, either downplaying or exaggerating his history depending on who you are and what he wants you to think of him. But his estimate of a “typical” number will still be influenced by his own, and by that of his friends and acquaintances (who, because of the selection effect, are probably more similar to him than the general population is). “When we talk about other people,” Cowen writes, “we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it or not.”