Pluralistic ignorance
This actually happened to me. A smoke alarm in the hallway of my girlfriend’s apartment building had a low battery and started beeping intermitently. Everyone on the floor could hear the beeping which occured once every 5-10 minutes.
The theory of course is that since there are so many people who would be affected by this, that at least one of them would contact the landlord about it. This, however, was not the case and the beeping occured all night long.
The reason why nobody called the landlord was because everyone else thought that someone else would have done it. This typing of thinking, called pluralistic ignorance, affects us all. All it would take is one person to publicly ‘dissent’ from the status quo. But really in my head I thought that dissenting wasn’t the ‘correct’ course of action. I knew that no one else was publicly dissenting, so I assumed that going along wiht the group was the right thing to do.
If you want someone done, don’t wait for someone else to do it, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Do it yourself!
Another example is clapping at the end of presentation. A presentation or speach ends, and there is that awkard pause. “Should we clap?” We look around and see no one else is clapping, even though we think clapping to congratulate the presentor is the correct thing to do. But the fact that no one else is doing it, we take as evidence that it’s not the correct thing to do.
All it takes is one person to start clapping, to dissent, and we all follow suite.
Quite interesting stuff. For more check out Social Proof.
