CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Kieran Stockley

Title: Pluralistic Ignorance, Social Image and Co-ordination: An Experiment on the Origins of Misperceptions

Abstract: Pluralistic ignorance - a systematic discrepancy between private beliefs and second-order beliefs about these private beliefs - is a phenomenon which is increasingly connected with negative outcomes in a variety of domains. Despite this, we understand little about the origins of pluralistic ignorance and in particular, we have no empirical evidence regarding whether we should expect pluralistic ignorance to arise if conventions about expressing certain views are not well established. I propose a novel experiment design in which I test whether variation in social image functions is sufficient to cause variation in the incidence of pluralistic ignorance in a situation in which prior beliefs do not suggest a majority view. I first pre-screen individuals and elicit their private views and their perceived social image functions attached to expressing these views on a number of sociopolitical issues. I then use this pre-screen to selectively invite individuals to an experiment where they play a collective action game in which success is defined by a sufficient number of participants holding the same view contributing to the collective action, with a prior period consisting of rounds of bilateral communication in which participants can share views with each other. The selective inviting of participants is based on one of the views they provide in the pre-screen and is such that (a) sessions are, in expectation, balanced in the distribution of private views in order to induce this as a prior belief, (b) the exact distribution of views in the session is unknown to participants, and (c) variation in the social image functions participants perceive around sharing views is imported through the variation in which topic defines the session construction.