Why people don’t speak out against, and even defend, norms they secretly despise

You're in a meeting and the presenter asks, “Does anyone have any questions?”. Do you look around, see "no one else raising their hands, and then chose to pass on the opportunity to clear up your confusion?". Congratulations, you've just fallen for pluralistic ignorance, and it explains a lot.

It is when "you feel like you’re different from everyone else, but in fact you are exactly the same... a sense that you are not with the majority that everyone in the majority can have simultaneously.”

But it doesn't just apply to individuals - it scales right up to the norms directing an entire society, so that everyone "gets stuck following a norm that no one wants to follow" because of the "false belief that the majority supports an unpopular norm", which in turn "slows down the process of ending it..

• everyone acts as though they live in a world that isn’t really there
• ... clinging to their outdated worldviews for longer than they would otherwise"
• those opposing the norms "feel less supported than they truly are while pushing people in the middle to favor the status quo... unintentionally serv[ing] as cultural carriers of cognitive error.”

cf “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” To solve, either have a child who everyone hears, or:

• "ask everyone what they really think and feel...
• broadcast that to everyone ... make the private public.
• make it safe to say what is really on your mind"

YANNS uses a powerful example - the Jonestown 1978 mass suicide & infanticide - to explain that, unfortunately, "When one person speaks up, instead of breaking the spell, the crowd will sometimes shout that person down". This is called false enforcement:

• Loyalty to the group overcomes their private doubts
• only because everyone assumes that everyone else in the group feels the way they say they feel.
• they don't, of course, because of pluralistic ignorance
• but they don't know that, so they actually shout down the rebel they privately agree with,