Emergence of Pluralistic Ignorance: An Agent-Based Approach

Pluralistic ignorance is a puzzling social psychological phenomenon in which the majority of group members privately reject a norm yet mistakenly believe that most others accept it. Consequently, they publicly may comply with the norm. This phenomenon has significant implications for politics, economics, and organizational dynamics because it can mask widespread support for change and hinder collective responses to large-scale societal challenges. The aim of this work is to demonstrate how agent-based modeling, one of the core methods of computational social science, can be used to investigate pluralistic ignorance. This approach is particularly natural in this context, because it allows us to study how individual behavior and local social interactions generate macro-level collective phenomena. Rather than providing a systematic literature review, we focus on several models, including our own two models based on the psychological Social Response Context Model, as well as two other representative models: one of the earliest and most influential computational models of self-enforcing norms, and a model of opinion expression based on a silence game. For all of these models, we provide custom NetLogo implementations, publicly available at https://barbarakaminska.github.io/NetLogo-Pluralistic-ignorance/, which allow users not only to run their own simulations but also to follow the algorithms step by step. In conclusion, we note that despite differences in assumptions and structures, these models consistently reproduce pluralistic ignorance, suggesting that it may be a robust emergent phenomenon.The manuscript is forthcoming in the Handbook of Computational Social Psychology, part of Edward Elgar’s Research Handbooks in Social Psychology series