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Pluralistic Ignorance: A Trade-Off Between Group-Conformity and Cognitive Dissonance

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Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2019)

Abstract

Interactions within groups of people lead to many forms of aberrant social psychology. One is pluralistic ignorance (PI), in which the majority of people in a group express opinions that differ from their real beliefs. PI occurs for various reasons: one is the drive to belong to a group. To understand how PI emerges, this study presents an agent-based model that represents PI as the outcome of the trade-off between agents’ group conformity and cognitive dissonance (psychological discomfort). We show that the trade-off can lead to various outcomes, depending on agents’ choice, or bias towards one tendency or the other.

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Correspondence to Fatima Seeme .

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Seeme, F., Green, D., Kopp, C. (2019). Pluralistic Ignorance: A Trade-Off Between Group-Conformity and Cognitive Dissonance. In: Gedeon, T., Wong, K., Lee, M. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11954. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36711-4_58

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36711-4_58

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36711-4

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