Abstract

A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speaking, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been invoked to explain many otherwise puzzling phenomena in social psychology. The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the nature of PI states – their structure, internal consistency and opacity – using the formal apparatus of Dynamic Doxastic Logic, and also to study the sense in which such states are “fragile”, i.e. to identify plausible conditions under which a PI state cascades into a state of shared belief as the result of announcement.