ORCID

Abstract

Most people believe that biodiversity loss is human-caused, yet they may not realize how many others share this belief. Such collective misperceptions—known as pluralistic ignorance—may hinder individual and system changes required to address biodiversity loss. At the same time, reducing pluralistic ignorance may promote positive change. In this Perspective, we provide a brief overview of existing work on pluralistic ignorance about environmental topics and propose an agenda for impactful pluralistic ignorance research in the biodiversity domain. We highlight several research gaps and offer recommendations, including (a) investigating different forms of pluralistic ignorance, (b) improving our understanding of consequences and determinants, and (c) broadening the intervention toolkit to counter pluralistic ignorance for biodiversity conservation. To increase the Perspective’s practical applicability, we describe historical and contemporary case studies on pluralistic ignorance and biodiversity conservation from around the globe.

Publication Date

2025-01-01

Publication Title

Global Environmental Change

Volume

95

ISSN

0959-3780

Acceptance Date

2025-07-23

Deposit Date

2025-09-08

Funding

Data collection was funded by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) . We thank Jana K. Köhler, Karla A. Garduño-Realivazquez, Christian A. P. Haugestad, Aishwarya Iyer, Michalina Marczak, Olivia Melville, Radisti A. Praptiwi, Gargi Ranade, Małgorzata Winkowska, Lu-Ning He, Caroline Marrs, Nateecha Powdthavee, Viviana Vitale, and Alice Yamamoto-Wilson for their help with the translation and back-translation.

Keywords

Behavior change, Biodiversity conservation, Misperceptions, Pluralistic ignorance, Second-order beliefs, Social norm

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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