Pluralistic Ignorance: A Trade-Off Between Group-Conformity and Cognitive Dissonance

摘要

Interactions within groups of people lead to many forms of aberrant social psychology. One is pluralistic ignorance (PI), in which the majority of people in a group express opinions that differ from their real beliefs. PI occurs for various reasons: one is the drive to belong to a group. To understand how PI emerges, this study presents an agent-based model that represents PI as the outcome of the trade-off between agents' group conformity and cognitive dissonance (psychological discomfort). We show that the trade-off can lead to various outcomes, depending on agents' choice, or bias towards one tendency or the other.