Dale Miller

Who they are

According to his Stanford profile, Miller has been at Stanford since 2002. Before that he was a professor at Princeton from 1986 to 2002, and earlier held posts at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario, with a visiting year at the University of Michigan. He took his PhD at the University of Waterloo in 1975 and his BA at the University of Victoria in 1971. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1980 to 1981 and at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2001 to 2002.

The profile describes his research as covering social and group behaviour, including the effects of social norms, the part played by justice considerations in individual and organisational decisions, and the conditions under which people and organisations can be persuaded to change course. It also names the emergence of norms that lack broad support, which is the territory of pluralistic ignorance, and how the belief that one is moral shapes thought and action. His book The Power of Identity Claims was published by Routledge in 2020.

This page records only what those sources state. It does not try to summarise a career from memory.

Key papers

Miller, D. T., & McFarland, C. (1987). Pluralistic ignorance: When similarity is interpreted as dissimilarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(2), 298-305. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.2.298.

The abstract defines pluralistic ignorance as a situation in which people read the same behaviour as reflecting different inner states in themselves and in others. The authors argue it is most likely when people regard fear of embarrassment as a sufficient reason for their own behaviour but not for other people's. In the first of the reported experiments, participants rated themselves as more subject to the traits behind social inhibition than they rated the average other person to be. In the second, participants chose whether to take an action that carried possible benefits and possible embarrassment, and then estimated how many others would do the same. A third experiment put groups in the same setting. Only the first two are described here, because the abstract available to this site stops before the third result.

Prentice, D. A., & Miller, D. T. (1993). Pluralistic ignorance and alcohol use on campus: some consequences of misperceiving the social norm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(2), 243-256. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.64.2.243. The abstract records that students believed their peers were more comfortable with campus drinking than they were themselves.

Key ideas

The idea that carries furthest from these papers is an asymmetry in how people explain behaviour. Each person has access to their own fear of embarrassment, so their own silence has an obvious explanation. Other people's silence arrives with no explanation attached, and the reading available is that they have nothing to say, or that they agree. Both parties make the same inference about each other, and the group ends up with a public pattern that few members privately hold.

That asymmetry is the mechanism behind the quiet meeting discussed in Why Does Nobody Speak Up in Meetings. It is a reading of the mechanism, not a finding about offices: neither paper studied meetings.

Two cautions belong with the credit. The term itself is older than Miller's papers. It is attributed to Floyd Allport and Daniel Katz around 1931, and this site records the attribution at medium confidence. And the misperception, which replicates, should be kept apart from the remedies built on it. A 2015 Cochrane review of social norms information for student alcohol misuse, by Foxcroft and colleagues, found no substantive benefit, so correcting the picture has not reliably corrected the behaviour. See Pluralistic Ignorance for the standing of each claim.

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