Download “Pluralistic ignorance… exists when, within a group of individuals

“Pluralistic ignorance… exists when, within a group of individuals, each person
believes his or her private attitudes, beliefs, or judgments are discrepant from the norm
displayed by the public behavior of others” (Apple, Kahn, & Lambert, 2003, p. 3) In
other words, pluralistic ignorance is a “collective misinterpretation” of a particular event
or topic—in this case, we are referring to the hook-up culture prevalent at Boston College
(Baumeister & Bushman, 2007, p. 241). By its definition, the conception refers to the
discrepancy between the real distribution of public opinion and people’s perceived
distribution of public opinion. It can refer to the extreme case of absolute pluralistic
ignorance, in which people misperceive the minority position on an issue to be the
majority position, and vice versa; or it can refer also to the scenario of relative pluralistic
ignorance (Ross, Green, & House, 1977), in which people simply overestimate or
underestimate certain opinions of others. In summary, pluralistic ignorance marks “a
continuum of bias and inaccuracy, and it can be graver or milder” (Shamir & Shamir,
1997, p. 228).
Boston College parties are generally seen as places to “let loose” and “find
someone to do it with.” Everybody assumes that everybody else is hooking up and that
that is the norm, and thus many students are willing to compromise their own religious
values in order to engage in behavior that others seem to tacitly approve of and enjoy.
Students do not realize that others’ seemingly tacit compliance may in fact merely be
confusion, which is understandable. The term “hooking up’s” ambiguous nature allows
for this confusion. There is not really a clear-cut definition of “hooking up.” Many
students simply act as though they know what they are doing, but in reality, they are just
trying to go along with what they believe others are doing in order to be accepted. This
phenomenon is universal; black, white, Buddhist, or Christian, all of Boston College
students have experienced pluralistic ignorance in the realm of “hook ups.”
Previous studies have demonstrated the existence of pluralistic ignorance among
college students in the area of sex-related issues. The findings show that students tend to
overestimate the extent to which their peers’ sexual standards are liberal. College
students believed that the average other person of their own sex expected sexual
intercourse in a relationship to begin much sooner than was actually the case (Cohen &
Shotland, 1996). When estimating the level of peers’ comfort concerning campus-based
sexual behaviors, the perceived comfort rating that college students reported were higher
than the actual comfort ratings (Hines, Saris, & Throckmorton-Belzar, 2002). In addition,
college students overrated their peers’ comfort level with the behavior of “hooking-up.”
Similarly, we saw similar correlations between our study and those done by others
involving pluralistic ignorance. Many of the interviewees believed that other college
students hold different opinions to theirs when asked, how much of the student body, do
you think holds opinions similar to yours? One interviewee who said, “I think a lot of
people say that they feel the same way, but I don’t think that they really do. I’d say less
than half.” Likewise, the percentages that these interviewees used to answer this question
were less than fifty percentage of the college student population. On interviewee said, “I
think about half of the population feel the same way I do. Of the others, I think onequarter would think that hooking-up is unacceptable and wouldn’t engage, and the other
one-quarter would be fine with casual sex” and another interviewee responded with,
“Less than half because I feel like my sense of morality is rather more traditional and
stronger than the regular college students.” Other interviewees simply answered
“probably not many” when asked this question.
Additional Reference
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The ‘false consensus effect’: an egocentric
bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 13, 279-301.
Shamir, J., & Shamir, M. (1997). Pluralistic ignorance across issues and over time:
information cues and biases. Public Opinion Quarterly, 61, 227-260.