Sources of Pluralistic Ignorance: A Scoping Review and Tripartite Framework for Causes of Shared Social Misperceptions

Interpersonal, societal, and political interaction is aided by accurately understanding how other people think and feel. Yet, research demonstrates broadly shared misperceptions of others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions in a variety of contexts—a phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance. Despite a century of research and theory on pluralistic ignorance, limited work systematically considers possible drivers of these patterns of misperceptions, leaving us with a poor understanding of how to address the phenomenon. In the present work, we draw on theories from psychology and related social science disciplines to construct a systematic framework of the potential causes of pluralistic ignorance. Our framework proposes that pluralistic ignorance can emerge from three broad categories of psychological and contextual factors: a) information availability, b) heuristics, and c) directionally motivated reasoning. In each section, we discuss research and theory supporting possible explanations for pluralistic ignorance and promising directions for corrective interventions.