Pluralistic Ignorance

A Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon

Many examples of pluralistic ignorance have been documented in small ad hoc groups. When individuals witness an emergency in the presence of others, they are less likely to offer help than when no other bystanders are present (bystander nonintervention), in part because when they are trying to understand the situation, they stay impassive, but they mistakenly interpret other people's impassivity as evidence that the situation is not an emergency a vicious circle leading to less assistance. In a classroom, students confused by a teacher's utterances often mistake their peers' silence for comprehension, and, as a result, a majority of students stay silent and confused, not realizing that no one else understands the material (the classroom problem). When discussing an issue about which they initially shared moderate attitudes, group members typically become more extreme (group polarization), in part because deviant thoughts are suppressed, and discussants think that everyone else is more extreme than they are. This phenomenon leads groups, in some cases, to a course of action that virtually no member privately supports, again because misgivings are kept under wraps, even if the misgivings are shared by all (one cause of groupthink) or because everyone erroneously believes that they are pleasing everyone else (the Abilene paradox).

Pluralistic ignorance also explains the persistence of existing social norms in established social groups, which sometimes espouse norms that very [Page 646]few members actually support in private. Thus, members of a campus fraternity were found to resist progressive admission policies that they privately approved because of the false assumption that the rest of the group did not approve of the policies. A majority of incoming college students believe that they are uniquely uncomfortable with heavy drinking, but they keep these misgivings to themselves, sustaining the illusion and leading some to drink excessively in order to match the imaginary heavy-drinking norm. Youth gang members believe that their peers support violence and crime more than they do, which explains the maintenance of deviant gang norms despite individual misgivings. Similarly, both prison guards and inmates believe that their peers hold attitudes much more antagonistic to the other group than those attitudes really are, explaining the maintenance of unnecessarily violent norms.

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