Pluralistic Ignorance

Pluralistic Ignorance

For those who want to enlist social influences, an important challenge, as well as a real opportunity, is pluralistic ignorance—that is, ignorance, on the part of all or most, about what other people think. We may follow a practice or a tradition not because we like it or even think it defensible, but merely because we think that most other people like it. Many social practices persist for this reason, which means a small shock, or nudge, can dislodge them.21 A dramatic example is Communism in the former Soviet bloc, which lasted in part because people were unaware of how large a share of the population despised the regime. As people became aware of what others actually thought, they were emboldened to say what they believed, and to act accordingly.

There is a clue here to understanding how large-scale social change comes about. Often people are authorized or nudged to speak and act in accordance with their actual views. Think of the wonderful Hans Christian Andersen story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The nudge is emphatically social; it often turns out to be a kind of permission slip. If a child says out loud that the emperor is naked, the people in a crowd might suddenly feel licensed to say so too. Dramatic changes, rejecting long-standing practices, are often produced by a nudge that starts a kind of cascade or bandwagon effect, because it gives people a sense of what others actually think, and thus authorizes them to say what they actually think too. Consider, for example, the rise of gay marriage, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter. All of these movements were fueled by visible actions, including vigorous social media campaigns, that permitted or encouraged people to reveal long-silenced anger and outrage. People who had shut themselves up, or suffered or grieved or raged in silence, suddenly saw a kind of green light.

A vivid example comes from an experiment in Saudi Arabia. The study describes a setting governed by “guardianship,” in which husbands had the final word on whether their wives worked outside the home. Asking a large group of young married men in private whether they are in favor of female labor force participation, economist Leonardo Bursztyn and his colleagues learned that the overwhelming majority answer yes.22 At the same time, they found that those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they wrongly think that other, similar men, even those in their local community, do not want their wives to join the labor force.

Bursztyn and his colleagues randomly corrected the beliefs of half of those young men about what other young men believed. As a result, they became far more willing to authorize their wives to work (recall the custom of guardianship)—and there was a significant impact on what women actually did. Four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment who had received the information about others’ beliefs were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job. Here’s the broader lesson: if people wrongly think that most people are committed to a long-standing social norm, a small nudge correcting that misperception can inaugurate large-scale change.