Pluralistic ignorance

In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (also known as a collective illusion or collective delusion) is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. In such cases, many people in a group may go along with a view they do not hold because they think, incorrectly, that most other people in the group hold it. Pluralistic ignorance encompasses situations in which a minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position, or the majority position is wrongly perceived to be a minority position.

Pluralistic ignorance can arise in different ways. An individual may misjudge overall perceptions of a topic due to fear, embarrassment, social desirability, or social inhibition. Individuals may develop collective illusions when they fear backlash for holding beliefs they think differ from society's beliefs. From a group-level perspective, divergence between public behavior and private opinion can result from conservative lags (change in attitude without a change in behavior), liberal leaps (change in behavior without a change in attitude), and social identities (conforming to societal expectations of how one should behave based on the traditional ideals of the group).

However, pluralistic ignorance describes the coincidence of a belief with inaccurate perceptions, not the process by which those inaccurate perceptions are formed. Related phenomena, such as the spiral of silence and false consensus effect, demonstrate that pluralistic ignorance is not unique in its inaccurate assumption of others' opinions, and these misconceptions can lead to negative consequences, such as groupthink and the bystander effect.