Pluralistic ignorance in the perception of others' emotional lives

Five studies document systematic errors in the perception of others' emotional lives. In Study 1, participants underestimated the proportion of their peers who had recently suffered negative emotional experiences. In Study 2, participants reported that negative emotional experiences were more likely than positive ones to occur in solitary contexts or to be effortfully hidden in public. In Study 3, participants underestimated the prevalence of the most common negative experiences described in Study 2, whereas they did not make this error for the most common positive experiences. In Study 4, people underestimated the extent of negative emotion and overestimated the extent of positive emotion in specific peers' lives, and the difference in estimation errors for positive vs. negative emotions was partially mediated by the extent to which the peers showed preferential suppression for negative (vs. positive) emotional expression. Study 5 replicated Study 3 and showed that lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences were associated with loneliness and rumination, whereas higher estimations of the prevalence of positive emotional experiences were associated with less satisfaction with life.