| Popis: |
We demonstrate that climate change pluralistic ignorance, the shared and systematic misperception of others’ beliefs, behaviors, and policy preference around climate change, can be broken down into two distinct phenomena that are predicted by different factors. We distinguish discrete pluralistic ignorance, misperceiving others’ preferences about a single topic or policy, from relative pluralistic ignorance, misperceiving others’ relative preferences across multiple topics or policies. Using a representative US survey sample, we demonstrate their conceptual and empirical independence across perceived support for 18 different climate-related policies among three target groups: all voters, Democrats, and Republicans. Additionally, we measure over 50 potential predictors of pluralistic ignorance and find that distinct predictors are associated with the different instances of pluralistic ignorance. These findings suggest that existing work on climate change pluralistic ignorance may be missing its full depth, and underestimating the role stereotypic processes play in driving misperceptions across intergroup boundaries. |
