Imagine you’re in a meeting with a lot of important people. The boss comes in, takes a seat, and starts talking “strategic market knowledge” this and “leveraging competitive advantages” that.
It all sounds like gibberish to you. It doesn’t mean anything.
For a second you wonder if you’re in the right meeting. Surely someone else must feel as confused as you?
So you take a quick sanity check. You look around the room at your colleagues and … what??
They are paying attention and nodding their head in total agreement? How can this be?
They must know something you don’t know.
You quickly determine the best option is to keep your mouth shut and say nothing, hiding what you think is your own ignorance. But you’re not alone. Everyone is thinking the same thing.
Pluralistic Ignorance
The word for this is pluralistic ignorance, a psychological state characterized by the belief that one’s private thoughts are different from those of others.
The term was coined in 1932 by psychologists Daniel Katz and Floyd Allport and describes the common group situation where we privately believe one thing, but feel everyone else in the group believes something else.
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
George S. Patton
In the case above, pluralistic ignorance means that rather than interrupting the meeting to ask for a clarification, we’ll sit tight and nod like everyone else. It’s a real life version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the fairy tale where everyone pretends the king is wearing clothes until a child points out the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
When You Think Your Alone
If you scratch below the surface though, what’s really happening with pluralistic ignorance is that you’re not accurately accessing how others in your group are thinking. The happens most when you feel you have a view that isn’t shared by a large percentage of other people.
In this short video, Dan Ariely, explains and demonstrates pluralistic ignorance better than I can. Make sure you watch the whole thing, the kicker is at the end.
Basically we look toward others for cues about how to act when we really should take a page out of Richard Feynman’s book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?