Perceived Peer Offense and Pluralistic Ignorance in Discussions of Social Issues

Approximately 200 undergraduate students will be recruited to complete an online survey for this pilot study. Participants will be presented with a series of five contemporary social issues relevant in Canada (e.g., immigration policy). For each topic, participants will respond to two key questions. First, they will report how they personally would feel if they heard opinions that strongly oppose their own, using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from extremely welcoming to extremely offended. This measure captures personal offense. Second, participants will be asked to estimate the percentage of other undergraduate students they believe would be extremely offended by hearing opinions different from their own. This measure captures perceived peer offense. This pilot study has two main purposes. The first is to test a core assumption of our main study: that students overestimate how offended their peers would be by hearing views different from their own. The second purpose is to inform the manipulation used in the main study. Specifically, perceived peer offense will be manipulated using two statements based on the pilot data. In the low perceived peer offense condition, participants will be told that a relatively low percentage of students reported being offended in a past study; this percentage will reflect the actual proportion of pilot participants who reported being extremely offended, and thus will represent a relatively accurate norm. In the high perceived peer offense condition, participants will be shown a percentage based on students’ estimates of peer offense from the pilot study, which we expect will be much higher than reports of personal offense based on the aforementioned core assumption. Therefore, this percentage will not be accurate but will reflect a potential misperceived norm regarding how likely students believe their peers are to be offended.