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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Bayesian Truth Serum, Pluralistic Ignorance

I can remember just this occuring in a project in the enterprise, on pluralistic ignorance.  I guess this calls for more transparency? ..  It begins:

" ... In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance, a term coined by Daniel Katz and Floyd H. Allport in 1931, describes “a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume (incorrectly) that most others accept it…It is, in Krech and Crutchfield’s (1948, pp. 388–89) words, the situation where ‘no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes’”. This, in turn, provides support for a norm that may be, in fact, disliked by most people ... "   It had not occurred to me that pluralistic ignorance could wreak havoc on the prediction market approach I proposed. Specifically, there is a risk that, even though the majority participants in the market hold a particular opinion, they suppress their individual opinions and instead vote based on mistaken assumptions about the collective opinion of others ... '

 Read the whole thing and the related links ...

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