Food Norms and Preferences in Schools: is there Pluralistic Ignorance?

We use behavioural games to identify preferences, beliefs about others’ preferences, and higher-order beliefs, amongst adolescents at a UK comprehensive school. Pupils systematically under-rate the attractiveness of ‘healthy’, and over-rate that of ‘unhealthy’, foods. The bias is consistently in the direction of higher-order beliefs. Pluralistic ignorance would explain much of the results and seems clearly instantiated in one case.