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Concept
Pluralistic ignorance
Summary
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (also known as a collective illusion) is a phenomenon which occurs when people mistakenly believe that everyone else holds a different opinion than their own. Most people in a group may go along with a view they do not agree with, because they incorrectly think that most other people in the group agree with it. It refers to a situation in which the minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position or where the majority position is wrongly perceived to be the minority position. Pluralistic ignorance can arise due to a number of different factors. An individual may misjudge overall perceptions of a topic due to fear, embarrassment, social desirability, or social inhibition. Any of these can lead to the individual incorrectly perceiving the proportion of the general public who share similar beliefs to oneself. As such, pluralistic ignorance can only describe the coincidence of a belief with inaccurate perceptions, but not the process to get to those inaccurate perceptions. Thus, individuals may develop collective illusions when they feel they will receive backlash on their belief as they think it differs from society's belief.
A common example of pluralistic ignorance is the bystander effect, where individual onlookers may believe others are considering taking action, and may therefore themselves refrain from acting. This results in all the individual onlookers believing that the majority of onlookers are taking action, when in reality the minority or none of the onlookers take action.
Prentice and Miller conducted a contemporary study on pluralistic ignorance, examining individuals beliefs on alcohol use and estimating the attitudes of their peers. The authors found that, on average, individual levels of comfort with drinking practices on campus were much lower than the perceived average. In one subset of experiments they traced the attitude change toward alcohol consumption of men versus women over the semester.
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