CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Kieran Stockley

Title: Social Stigma and Pluralistic Ignorance

Abstract: In this project, we propose tools to separately measure features of the social image environment, particularly social stigma, and pluralistic ignorance. We test these across a range of sociopolitical issues at the University of Nottingham in order to generate stylized facts about the relationship between social image environment features and the incidence of pluralistic ignorance. In particular, we aim to separately measure the salience of particular issues, the social stigma attached to expressing certain views, and the likelihood of receiving social sanctions if expressing certain views. We find evidence that increased stigma surrounding a topic leads participants to overestimate the prevalence of the less stigmatized view among other participants. We also find suggestive evidence of a counteracting bias drawing participants to underweight the size of majority views, in line with previous literature on misperceptions. In total, we find that participants think other participants are less politically correct than these participants report.