Your psychology professor finishes up her lecture and asks if anyone has any questions. No one raises a hand. You were hopelessly confused by the lecture but assume that everyone else must have understood it since no one asked anything. Later, you find out that your friends in the class were also confused, but they thought they were the only ones. Social psychologists would call this confusion a consequence of

a. diffusion of responsibility.
b. representativeness.
c. availability heuristic.
`d. pluralistic ignorance.

Pluralistic ignorance is the wrong view of reality by people, where these people have the wrong view of reality. They generally reject a norm that affects them, and try to replicate that feeling of rejection towards others who somehow end up disregarding it as well. In some cases, norms have an intrinsic component that benefits some and harms the vast majority, and it is important to carry out a prior analysis before judging people for some type of demonstration or mobilization against a norm.