YANSS 279 - Pluralistic Ignorance (rebroadcast)

You Are Not So Smart

Science, Psychology, Brain, Business, Mental Health, Culture, Neuroscience, Mind, Health

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2024

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are several ways to define pluralistic ignorance, and that’s because it’s kind of a brain twister when you try to put it into words. On certain issues, most people people believe that most people believe what, in truth, few people believe. Or put another way, it is the erroneous belief that the majority is acting in a way that matches its internal philosophies, and that you are one of a small number of people who feel differently, when in reality the majority agrees with you on the inside but is afraid to admit it outright or imply such through its behavior. Everyone in a group, at the same time, gets stuck following a norm that no one wants to follow, because everyone is carrying a shared, false belief about everyone else’s unshared true beliefs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the You're Not So Smart Podcast. I'm David McCramney and people often ask me what's the
0:08.4	episode that I am most proud of or the one that I would if they've never heard the show which one should they
0:13.6	listen to first it's always this one that I tell them to listen to and I was
0:18.6	telling someone about this recently and I realized oh wow it's been four years
0:22.4	ago since this episode came out and I've realized, oh wow, it's been four years ago
0:23.4	since this episode came out.
0:25.1	And I've been on this humongous tour
0:28.0	to promote how minds change, and I've told so many people about this and I just expect them to go in the back
0:34.0	catalog and find it and I thought now would be a good time to bring it up to the top
0:38.8	because we're going to talk a lot about topics like this over the course of the next year. So here it is, along with the
0:46.4	original warning at the beginning which comes right after this. This is a
0:52.0	disclaimer, a warning that this episode features some audio that some
0:57.2	listeners may want to avoid. It features children in distress. It's from a
1:01.8	historical event. It's real audio. I tried to be
1:05.0	respectful of not just the people featured in that audio but
1:10.3	listeners who might not want to hear that, but it's in here.
1:14.0	And I know it bothered me,
1:16.0	so I just wanted to give you a chance to check out
1:18.5	if you just rather not be exposed to things like that.
1:22.0	If so, you can skip ahead,
1:24.0	four minutes and about 40 seconds
1:26.0	to skip that part of the show. You're going to be a Welcome to the U.S. call me a call with a button, they require.
	...

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