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Estimating the Prevalence of Shyness in the “Global Village”: Pluralistic Ignorance or False Consensus?
Author(s) -
Harris Peter R.,
Wilshire Philip
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1988.tb00893.x
Subject(s) - shyness , psychology , social psychology , ignorance , feeling , optimism , attribution , personality , misfortune , developmental psychology , anxiety , philosophy , epistemology , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , computer science , perspective (graphical)
Only a minority of those who experience shyness consider themselves to be shy people One explanation for this lies in the possibility that those who so label themselves underestimate the extent to which their feelings are shared by others (i.e, perceive the consensus surrounding their experiences as low [Kelley, 1967]), resulting in an internal rather than external attribution This proposition was tested by asking shy and not‐shy followers of two TV soap operas to rate a number of characters from the programs, together with a list of their friends and relatives, for shyness, competitiveness, and optimism Although there were no differences between the groups in their ratings of competitiveness and optimism, the shy subjects reported greater shyness among both the soap‐opera characters and their friends and relatives than the not‐shy group Whatever the basis for the self‐labeling of shyness, therefore, it does not appear to he in the low consensus/pluralistic ignorance notion A number of alternative explanations are discussed, together with the implications of these findings for explanations of the false consensus effect