Suppose that you have come to participate in a psychology experiment, and while you are sitting in a room by yourself filling out some forms, smoke starts to pour through a vent into the room.
What would you do?
Well, being a reasonal person, you would leave the room, find somebody, and let them know that something was wrong.
Suppose, however, that two other people whom you do not know are in the room with you, filling out forms, when smoke starts to come through the vent.
What would you do?
When this experiment was performed, participants in 62 percent of the three‒person groups failed to report the smoke within six minutes, by which time the smoke was thick enough to obscure the participants’ vision.
This diffusion of responsibility depends, in part, upon pluralistic ignorance.
We look to others to find out what we should think.
They are busy filling out their forms.
Clearly they do not think that this smoke is anything to worry about.
It must just be some kind of vapor or something.
Others are looking at us to see what they should think.
When they see us, we are busy filling out our forms.
Clearly we do not appear to think that the smoke is anything to worry about, so they do not think that the smoke is anything to worry about either.
Pluralistic ignorance is an example of an organizing feature of social interactions called “the principle of social proof.”
We look to others to determine what is correct and what it is that we should do.
In general, the greater the degree of ambiguity, the more we rely on others to guide our own thoughts and actions.
And given the ambiguity concerning existential questions, we would then expect that we would be particularly susceptible to looking to others for answers.