Pluralistic ignorance: historical development and organizational applications

Abstract

This paper examines the historical development of pluralistic ignorance as a construct and its application to organizational studies. Pluralistic ignorance is a social comparison error where an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that others hold the opposite opinion. Pluralistic ignorance was first developed as an important social construct in the 1920s by social psychologist Floyd Allport, and has been applied to myriad settings in psychology and sociology, including racial segregation, student perceptions of alcohol use, and classroom behavior. Despite work in pluralistic ignorance for over 75 years, it has only recently been applied to management settings. Management scholars have suggested applications of pluralistic ignorance to decision‐making, business ethics, group dynamics, performance appraisal, and burnout. Other management applications are proposed as a means to guide research in pluralistic ignorance in the future.