Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like,...

In a continuous opinion dynamics model using a bounded confidence assumption, individuals can only influence each other’s opinions when those opinions are sufficiently close. However, we often observe real-world cases in which opinions are very different, yet individuals feel compelled to change their ideas to conform with their peers or superiors (or in rare cases, are willing to change them v...

Academic and corporate research departments alike face a crucial dilemma: to exploit known frameworks or to explore new ones; to specialize or to innovate? Here I show that these two conflicting epistemic desiderata are sufficient to explain pluralistic ignorance and its boom-and-bust-like dynamics, exemplified in the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis as a modern risk management para...

Knowledge management as traditionally espoused has two main strands: dealing with the aggregation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge. However this official discourse and its key concepts grew out of the experience of large, mature, highly structured and dispersed enterprises. Looking at the environment in which small enterprises work suggests a different set of key concepts, looking at ...

In previous continuous opinion dynamics models based on bounded confidence assumptions, individuals can only influence each other’s opinions when those opinions are sufficiently close; subsequently, agents construct their self-opinions using opinions collected from other agents. All of these models lack the element of an agent’s inner self-attitude. In this paper we describe our proposal for a ...

This study's the question how well moral educators know their students' moral views, is part of the more general question whether they base their efforts to foster moral development on adequate understanding of children. The findings show that most teachers indeed seem to possess a stereotypical image of the student. In order to reduce pluralistic ignorance, I recommend that moral educators sho...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to present, in an integrated manner, the knowledge acquired about pluralistic ignorance in the fields of social psychology, sociology and business. Particularly, to identify the factors that work as antecedents of pluralistic ignorance, as well as its consequences, in various research contexts. Design/methodology: This integrative study on pluralistic ignorance...

Taxpayers may justify non-compliant behaviour with the perceived high prevalence (descriptive norm) or high acceptability (injunctive norm) of tax non-compliance in the population. However, their perception may be distorted: their taxpaying behaviour may follow misperceived norms and reflect ‘pluralistic ignorance’. In an experimental questionnaire study focusing on the injunctive norm, psychol...