The discovery of pluralistic ignorance: An ironic lesson

In recent years, an increasing number of social and behavioral scientists have begun to pay serious attention to pluralistic ignorance, the shared false ideas of individuals about the sentiments, thoughts, and actions of others. Most of these researchers are unaware of the original effort to investigate these patterns of cognitive error and, consequently, misunderstand, as did the original investigators, some of the implications of their own work. The discovery of this important social phenomenon by Floyd H. Allport and his students, Daniel Katz and Richard L. Schanck, and how their preoccupation with individual characteristics and their relative neglect of social characteristics led them to underestimate the value of their discovery, is discussed. Allport's original interest in pluralistic ignorance and how he and Katz documented it empirically are presented, as is a review of Schanck's research extending their analysis.