What is pluralistic ignorance?
Pluralistic ignorance
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they incorrectly assume that most others accept it.[1] This is also described as "no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes". In short, pluralistic ignorance is a bias about a social group, held by the members of that social group.[2][3]
Ambiguity effect
It is human to avoid ambiguous knowledge - to assume things are knowable when they are not. This is related to the clustering illusion. When presented with large amounts of confounding variables, people still tend to claim knowledge of the unknowable. This produces cognitive dissonance which when avoided leads people to try to change venues to something with more certainty.