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“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.