Schroeder, C. M. & Prentice, D. A. (1998). Exposing pluralistic ignorance to reduce alcohol use among college students. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28(23), 2150–2180. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1998.tb01365.x.
Key takeaways
- Telling entering students that their peers are privately less comfortable with campus drinking than they appear was followed by less self-reported drinking months later than a decision-making discussion was.
- The correction did not lower the comfort students attributed to the average student, relative to control. The authors infer that it weakened the norm’s grip, measured as the moderating role of fear of negative evaluation, rather than moving the norm.
- They locate the consequential error in the perceived uniformity of peer opinion, the “illusion of universality”, more than in its perceived centre.
- First-year men reduced pluralistic ignorance by revising their view of the average student, not their own attitude. That is the opposite direction from the second-year men of Prentice and Miller 1993 (LIT-1370).
Why this is here
CLAIM-415 cites Prentice and Miller 1993 (LIT-1370) for men who moved their private attitudes toward a misperceived norm, the one result it names of private change under a misperceived consensus. That paper is Unavailable. This one, by Prentice and a student, restates the 1993 finding (p. 2153) and runs a longitudinal comparison of its own on the same campus.