[MUSIC] I'm talking of pluralistic ignorance and wrong normative expectation. But something similar to pluralistic ignorance may occur, in so far as people have wrong expectation. Not wrong normative expectations in this case, but instead wrong empirical expectation. I must also add that in this case, there is no issue of transparent communication. People may have completely transparent communication, they just have the wrong empirical expectations. People may completely misrepresent the frequency of bribing behavior. Or you may think because you talk to people that bribing is very, very common and maybe bribing is not that common. Your empirical expectation are false, but if you find it convenient to behave as most other people do. Or if you want to imitate what you think is frequent behavior, you will swell the ranks of those who follow the descriptive norm. Indeed, what was not a descriptive norm initially may become one because of increased following due to an initially wrong perception. An interesting case is electricity usage rates. So people may believe that usage rates are much higher than they actually are. And therefore, I may base my energy expenditure on this false expectation. Now in this case, what the public should know, is what are the real rates of electricity usage? This is crucial, so it's very important to let people know what's the real frequency of a certain behavior. Because often, we would really get the wrong ideas about how frequent a behavior is. And these may lead us to behave, in a sense, in the wrong way. Now how would pluralistic ignorance end? What can we do to eliminate it? Updating people's expectations, especially if the update comes from a trusted source, trust is very important in this case. But updating from a trusted source may help change behavior. In fact, this tactic has been used to change alcohol consumption on college campuses and hazing in institutions. So people were made aware of what there appears other students really thought about this activity, and the change has been significant. How do we combat misperception? This is different from pluralistic ignorance, as we do not have to change normative expectation. Informing people about the actual frequency of a specific behavior can combat the original misperception of how frequent a behavior really is. So what we call a healthy dose of reality can basically eliminate wrong perception of how frequent a certain behavior is. However, these kind of tactic may work wonders in the case of descriptive norms. Because you want to give people the right numbers, the right statistics. But would it work with social norms? I don't think so, but more of this later. To summarize, in the case of social norms, pluralistic ignorance means you observe norm consistent behavior. And infer that people endorse the norm, even if they do not. There is no transparent communication. In the case of descriptive norms, there is a misperception of how frequent a behavior is. That is, people have false empirical expectations. Because of this, we consider the behavior normal and may conform to it for various reasons. Forming a stable descriptive norm due to the misperception of frequencies, not a lack of transparent communication. Let's look at some interview that highlight the issue of pluralistic ignorance. FGC is an issue that people don't talk about. We know people do it in the community within the communities that practice it. It's a norm, that's what everybody does. When the girl is a certain age, she has to be cut, so that's expected. That's what everybody is required to do for a daughter. What is happened, is that when families decide not to cut a daughter, they keep it secret. They don't tell anybody for fear of being ostracized. So we really would need to have a lot people decide not to cut their daughters for it to make a difference in the community. Increasingly with education, talking to a number of colleagues, I found out that most families or a lot of families are deciding not to cut their daughters. But, it's not translated into an open forum where everybody says we are not going to do it.