Several members of a group would prefer shorter meetings, but each assumes everyone else values the long discussions. They continue attending politely, and each person’s politeness becomes evidence to the others that the current arrangement is popular.
Pluralistic ignorance is this mistaken picture of other people’s views. Unlike deliberate concealment, the central problem is a belief about the group. Studies of campus drinking norms found students perceiving others as more comfortable with prevailing practices than they themselves were.
Because people use one another’s behavior as evidence, an unpopular practice may continue without anyone explicitly demanding it. A few highly visible participants can also seem representative of a much larger group.
Making private views visible can help, but the method matters. A public show of hands may reproduce the same pressure; an anonymous poll may ask a question that does not capture the actual concern. Differences in how people interpret the options can create a new misunderstanding.
The point is to distinguish what people prefer from what they think others prefer. A group may discover that changing a practice requires less persuasion than expected because the supposed opposition existed mainly in people’s assumptions about one another.