Consider not thinking yourself into knots before you vote today. This is from a February article in Nautilus:
Last summer, in a New York Times article about Warren, a voter stated, “I love her enthusiasm. She’s smart, she’s very smart. I think she would make an amazing president,” before adding, “I’m worried about whether she can win.” The voter’s sentiment is reflected in a 2019 poll in which 74 percent of Democrats said they would be comfortable with a female president, yet only 33 percent of them thought their neighbors felt the same way.
We do this all the time. We go straight from hope to despair, from possibility to worst-case scenario without stopping for a breath. It’s flawed thinking, but tough to identify from inside your skull.
Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. commented on the phenomenon calling it “pluralistic ignorance” (no offense):
The pluralistic ignorance process goes like this: You feel a certain way. So do most other people. But you don’t realize other people feel the same way you do. You think it’s just the opposite. You behave based on your false beliefs about other people, rather than behaving in a way that is true to yourself.
It’s “pluralistic” because you are holding onto two sets of beliefs at once — your true beliefs and what you think other people believe. It is “ignorance,” because you are wrong about other people’s beliefs.
It is also a shared ignorance. You think your favorite candidate can’t get elected because you assume most people would not vote for that candidate. Lots of other people are doing the exact same thing – they have the same favorite candidate that you do, but they also assume that other people won’t vote for the candidate. That candidate can end up dropping out of the race or getting defeated, not because people didn’t believe in that candidate, but because of the pluralistic ignorance of thinking their own belief in the candidate was not shared, when it was. Too many people end up voting based on their mistaken beliefs about other people’s preferences, rather than their own preferences, which really are popular.
As a shy kid, I always fretted that people were looking at me and judging. It took way too long to realize other people were too busy worrying about how others perceived them to bother paying attention to me. That mistaken belief cost me a lot of years disappeared into the wallpaper. I don’t do that anymore. You should not either.
Please go vote and be true to yourselves. Bring a friend or two.
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