unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [40]
In other words, if teens and college students got their facts straight about what others were really doing and how those others really felt, fewer might feel pressured to have sex. Unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and even sexual assaults could well decline.
Psychologists call this gap between perception and facts pluralistic ignorance, and it doesn’t apply only to sex. Consider heavy drinking, for example: college students tend to think others are more comfortable with it than is actually the case. Studies suggest that male students, especially, may become heavy drinkers because they think—wrongly—that it’s expected. Some college campuses are trying a campaign called Most of Us to provide students with statistical evidence about the true attitudes of their peers regarding booze, in the hope that abuse of alcohol will decline when those with more cautious attitudes realize they are in the majority.
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Killer Facts
What you don’t know can kill you. But some life-saving information is on the way.
Federal health researchers estimate that 125 to 150 persons die each year because of anaphylaxis caused by food allergies. They also estimate that 1 out of every 50 adults and 1 out of every 20 infants suffer to some degree from food allergies, which send an estimated 30,000 persons each year to hospital emergency rooms.
People don’t always know what they’re eating. An FDA survey in 1999 and 2000 found that 25 percent of sampled baked goods, ice cream, and candy contained peanuts or eggs although these were not included on the ingredients list. However, in January 2006 a new federal law took effect, the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, which requires that manufacturers label for eight types of allergens that together account for 90 percent of allergic reactions: soybeans, eggs, milk, fish, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts (such as almonds and walnuts), and crustacean shellfish (such as shrimp and crab).
But be careful: the new law only applies to packaged foods, not to food sold by restaurants, neighborhood bakeries, kiosks, carry-out establishments, or street vendors.
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Facts Change History
Misperceptions of the truth about majority opinion may even have held back the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, surveys showed Americans grossly underestimated the strength of public support for desegregation, even in the Deep South. One famous study, by the sociologist Hubert J. O’Gorman, showed that in 1968, for example, only one in three white Southerners said he or she actually favored segregation, but nearly two in three said they believed a majority of whites were segregationists. To put it another way, desegregationist whites were a big majority in the South but thought they were a minority. Would they have spoken up sooner and pushed their political leaders harder for more liberal civil rights and voting laws if they had known their own political strength? Would Alabama’s George C. Wallace have carried five southern states in his 1968 presidential campaign had all whites known how others felt about segregation? We can never know for sure, but O’Gorman’s study suggests that history might have been different if people hadn’t been mistaken about how the majority felt.
We also have reason to speculate that mistaking the true attitudes of others might have contributed to the rash of business scandals and corporate crime that started coming to light in 2001. After the Enron scandal, a study conducted at the University of Oklahoma showed that lawyers think other lawyers are more likely to be unethical than they themselves are. Likewise, business students