[MUSIC] Today we're going to talk about a very interesting phenomenon which is called pluralistic ignorance. The most common definition of pluralistic ignorance is related to social norms. Many people privately condemn a behavior but wrongly believe their peers endorse it. Their normative expectation are wrong. As transparent communication may not be possible or will go along with a behavior. A different case of misperception is one in which it is not the normative expectation that are wrong, but instead the empirical expectation are. This type of misperception is related to what I have described before as descriptive norms. I will discuss this case later in this lecture. Let's focus for the moment on pluralistic ignorance and normative expectations. There are lot of examples of close communities like prison guards or teachers in a school In which when you interview them, they have a much more lenient disposition toward inmates or students. But because they observe much sterner behavior, they believe that everybody endorses that behavior and they are wrong because when you start interviewing people, they will all say my peers behave very sternly because they think it is right to behave like that. And so they themselves don't want to look deviant or different, don't want to be looked down and they behave in a sternal way, thus contributing to these false sense that this is what everybody believes in and want. In this case, we say that objective consensus and perceived consensus do not coincide. So the perception is completely wrong and people obey a norm that most of them dislike. Normative expectations are false. We say in this case we are facing pluralistic ignorance. Let's look at an example. This has been studied extensively. A majority of college student when interviewed, say well, we do not like to drink that much alcohol, but if you ask them, what do you believe your peers do? They respond, most of my peers approve of drinking. And therefore, if a student believes that, whenever a student goes to a student bar or to a student party they observe their peers drinking. What do they infer from this behavior, whether they infer that they do it because they like it, they endorse it, they think is the right thing to do? And so the poor student who observed that and want to be like a member of the group, will start drinking to fit in, even if the student dislike alcohol. And so this behavior gets reproduced even if individually most of the people don't like it that much. So in this case, the objective consensus is very different from the perceived one. When do we have pluralistic ignorance? So what are the circumstances that facilitate pluralistic ignorance? First of all the consequences of behavior or behavior itself, must be visible. So suppose that there is a strong rule against premarital sex and you don't see girls getting pregnant, so you infer that they do not have premarital sex. Or drinking behavior is very visible, you go a party, you go to a student bar, you observe behavior. So consequence of behavior or behavior itself must be visible. You must be able to tell what other people do or infer what they do. But, there is no transparent communication. What does it mean? It means that you don't want to voice your disagreement with certain behavior because this disagreement would put you at a disadvantage. So, what happens with pluralistic ignorance? People assume that the behavior of their peers, in this case, is consistent with their beliefs. And so if I see all the student drinking, I think well, they like to drink. They think that drinking is okay, it's almost mandatory maybe. So what the student will believe is all other student endorse this behavior and therefore I don't want to look different. What I'm going to do, I drink too. So I conceal what I really think. And this is the typical case of pluralistic ignorance. so there is behavior that you observe that goes in one direction. People may think the opposite, they don't have the courage to express their opinions, so there is no transparent communication. And this, a really unfortunate combination may lead to a behavior that most people dislike to persist.