Why it is a question
A39: “Most members privately oppose a norm, but a vocal minority and widespread silence make the norm seem overwhelmingly supported. The collective maintains the practice despite privately held opposition. Does changing information about the actual distribution of opinion dissolve the apparent consensus, or has the public norm already acquired independent institutional force?”
The record holds the mechanisms that make the apparent consensus, and not what happens when it is exposed.
- How it forms. A vocal minority can silence a majority with private beliefs held fixed (THEORY-242). Network position can make a rare attribute look like a local majority to most members (LIT-1390). Members can misjudge what the others privately hold (pluralistic ignorance, LIT-1370, not reached).
- What it does to a person. CLAIM-415: a person can be organized by a judgement attributed to a collective that does not hold it, and CASE-140 would test whether the attributed breadth does that work.
- What is missing. Both answers are possible. If the norm is held up only by each member’s belief about the others, correcting the belief should dissolve it. If the norm has been written into rules, roles, sanctions or other people’s expectations of enforcement, it may persist as an institution after no one believes it is popular. Then it is QUESTION-119’s case of a stance credited to a population whose effect is due to something other than the population as organized.
What would count as an answer
- An intervention that corrects members’ beliefs about the distribution of private opinion and measures both the beliefs and the practice after. Prentice and Miller’s campus studies are the obvious place to start, and were not reached (LIT-1370).
- A distinction, in cases, between a norm sustained by mutual misperception and one sustained by enforcement roles, with the first dissolving on correction and the second not. That would answer the question by dividing it.
- It would be dissolved, not answered, if correction never changes practice at all, so that the apparent consensus was never doing the work.