Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals infer that the identical actions of the self and others reflect different internal states. We propose that pluralistic ignorance arises most commonly in contexts where individuals believe that fear of embarrassment is a sufficient cause for their own behavior but not for the behavior of others. Three predictions derived from the proposed analysis were tested. In Experiment I, we examined the hypothesis that people believe that they possess more of those traits that lead to social inhibition than do others. Ratings of the self and the average other on a series of trait dimensions supported this hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we pursued the hypothesis that people believe that fear of embarrassment is a more potent determinant of their own behavior than of the behavior of others. Subjects first were given an opportunity to engage in or refrain from engaging in an action that potentially had both beneficial and embarrassing consequences. They then were asked to estimate the percentage of other subjects whom they believed would act similarly. Consistent with the predictions, subjects both avoided the embarrassing course of action and overestimated the percentage of others who took it. In Experiment 3, groups of subjects were placed in the same context that confronted the individual subjects in Experiment 2. As hypothesized, all subjects refrained from engaging in the embarrassing action but assumed that their behavior and that of the others who acted similarly reflected different origins. The implications of these findings for a variety of group dynamics and clinical phenomena are discussed.

Four studies were conducted to investigate the impact of self-enhancement motivation on the temporal comparisons of victims of stressful life events. Study 1 revealed that (a) victims were more likely than acquaintances of victims to report greater improvement in their personal attributes after traumatic life events than after mild negative life events and (b) victims perceived improvement by derogating their pre-event attributes. In Studies 2 and 3, an experimental approach was used to study the impact of threatening experiences on perceptions of personal growth, and similar findings were obtained. Study 4 confirmed that threatening self-relevant feelings play a causal role in prompting self-enhancing temporal comparisons. Taken together, the findings of these studies support the view that perceptions of personal improvement reflect, at least in part, motivated illusions that are designed to help people cope with threatening life experiences.

No abstract

In five studies, university students predicted their affective reactions to a wide variety of positive and negative future events. In Studies 1 to 3, participants also reported the affective reactions they experienced when the target event occurred. As hypothesized, they tended to anticipate more intense reactions than they actually experienced. In Studies 3 to 5, a cognitive determinant of this “intensity bias” was examined. It was hypothesized that people anticipate stronger affective reactions when they focus narrowly on an upcoming event in a manner that neglects past experience and less intense reactions when they consider a set of relevant previous experiences. Evidence from thought-listing measures as well as an experimental manipulation of temporal focus supported this hypothesis.

Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) identifies factors that determine the ease with which alternatives to reality can be imagined or constructed. One assumption of norm theory is that the greater the availability of imagined alternatives to an event, the stronger will be the affective reaction elicited by the event. The present two experiments explore this assumption in the context of observers' reactions to victims. It was predicted that negative outcomes that strongly evoked positive alternatives would elicit more sympathy from observers than negative outcomes that weakly evoked positive alternatives. The ease of counterfactual thought was manipulated in the first experiment by the spatial distance between the negative outcome and a positive alternative, and in the second experiment by the habitualness of the actions that precipitated the victimization. Consistent with norm theory, subjects recommended more compensation for victims of fates for which a positive alternative was highly available. Implications of the results for various types of reactions to victims are discussed.