A new study finds that popular high schoolers have much less sex than their peers think. It's part of a deeper lesson in how misperceptions can make good people behave badly.
In Hans Christian Andersen's story, The Emperor's New Clothes, fraudsters sew the king a suit made of air but persuade his court that only the "unworthy" cannot see it. Although the king and his ministers harbor private concerns, all men fawn over the invisible threads to prove their own sophistication. The emperor dances down the street. His subjects—confused, weirded out, suspecting that everybody else "sees" a garment—enthusiastically play along. "How fine!" they shout. "What a perfect fit!" It takes a child, too young to understand this pageantry of decorum, to point out that emperor is marching down the street buck naked.
Social psychologists have a fancy term for this sort of shared delusion. It is pluralistic ignorance, technically defined as "the psychological state characterized by the belief that one’s private attitudes and judgments are different from those of others, even though one’s public behavior is identical.”
More simply: It's many people collectively praising a king's robes while privately seeing only a naked monarch. It's peer pressure dipped in irony.
The emperor's invisible threads are strewn across some of history's most shameful episodes. There is evidence, for example, that many Germans privately thought that Hitler was a barbarian, but they pretended to support his policies because they mistakenly assumed their views were unique. Historical accounts suggest that many white southern Americans in the early 20th century deplored Jim Crow laws, but they felt compelled to support them.
These examples suggest, rather frighteningly, that a group of people can engage in systematic bigotry, even when a majority of them are not actually bigots.That's not group-think, where people think and act the same way when they get together. Rather it's group-ignorance: people thinking one thing and doing another, because they are deluded about the majority's real views and then are conforming to that delusion.
Perhaps you're looking back up at the headline by this point and wondering what does all this have to do with high school?
In fact, what doesn't peer pressure conducted under a cloud of ignorance have to do with high school? To be a teenager is to be the subject of nearly universal misunderstanding. Teens appear as strangers to their own parents, as hormonal monsters on television, and as flighty naifs, with smartphones grafted to their palms, in the media. But it turns out that teens are just as hopeless at assessing themselves. A new study of high school behavior finds that young people wildly over-estimate the sex and drug life of their own classmates and even their own cliques.
Read the full story in the New Republic.
Read a related article in Education Week.
Geoffrey Cohen is the James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, a professor of Psychology, and a professor of Organizational Behavior Stanford Graduate School of Business.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
