Pluralistic Ignorance

In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance, also called a collective illusion, is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own, so many people in a group go along with a view they do not privately hold because they wrongly think most of the group holds it. It covers both a minority position wrongly perceived as the majority view and a majority position wrongly perceived as a minority view. It can arise from fear of backlash, embarrassment, social desirability or social inhibition, and at the group level from a lag between changing attitudes and changing behavior, or from conforming to what a shared social identity is assumed to expect. Pluralistic ignorance is distinct from related misperception phenomena such as the spiral of silence and the false consensus effect, and the mistaken beliefs it produces have been linked to consequences including groupthink and the bystander effect.