Fear, Conformity, and Phantom Majorities

Resumen de los autores

In many ways, modern human brains are not adapted to modern environments, and our social worlds are one of the most significant evolutionary mismatches. Humans evolved in small-scale interdependent tribes, where information about local peer networks was observable or obtainable through mutual acquaintances. In such environments, people would have relatively good information about the prevalence of certain beliefs (a numerator) and a clear sense of their network size (a denominator), and thus could assess the relative popularity of different views and values. This assessment of majority views would help humans navigate their social worlds, allowing them to conform to popular beliefs and values or at least avoid visible violations of those beliefs and values. Given the small size of these environments, if dozens or hundreds of people appeared to support a particular perspective–and especially if one did not share that perspective–that perspective would be socially important and warrant consideration. In modern environments, and particularly on social media, we routinely encounter views endorsed (via likes and reshares) by dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people, where those seemingly popular views might represent <1% of the people who saw and thus could have endorsed the content. Human psychology is not adapted to intuit that thousands of people might be a socially insignificant percentage of people. I refer to these illusory crowds as “phantom majorities”: psychologically imposing masses of people that are experienced as far more representative of a population (and thus far more socially powerful) than they are in reality. In this short essay, I contend that (1) outgroup phantom majorities have contributed to exaggerated negative perceptions of outgroups and reactive extremism, and (2) ingroup phantom majorities have contributed to self-censorship, preference falsification, and mistargeted viewpoint conformity. Because both ingroup and outgroup phantom majorities can polarize, they may also contribute to self-fulfilling prophecies whereby seemingly popular fringe views become more popular, increasing their prevalence on social media and feeding back through the cycle.

Áreas y palabras clave

Cómo citar (APA 7)

Clark, C. J. (2026). Fear, Conformity, and Phantom Majorities. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/uw25s_v1